For patients living with knee osteoarthritis, treatment options have traditionally ranged from conservative therapies and injections to, eventually, knee replacement. But growing research into genicular artery embolization (GAE) is helping establish another potential option for patients seeking minimally invasive treatment.
Recent research from UCLA, including the groundbreaking GRAVITY Trial, provides some of the strongest evidence yet supporting GAE for symptomatic knee osteoarthritis.
The trial compared patients who underwent GAE with patients who were assigned to an observation group. At six months, 50% of patients who received GAE achieved at least a 50% reduction in their WOMAC score, compared with just 10.7% of patients in the observation group.
These results are particularly significant because randomized controlled trials provide a stronger level of evidence than studies in which every participant receives the treatment.
GAE takes a different approach to osteoarthritis pain. Rather than replacing or repairing the knee joint, the minimally invasive procedure targets abnormal blood vessels associated with inflammation around the arthritic knee. By reducing blood flow to these abnormal vessels, GAE may help reduce inflammation and pain.
You can learn more about GAE at ViP here!
The GRAVITY Trial helps demonstrate that the improvements seen following GAE can be significantly greater than those seen with observation alone. That is an important step toward establishing GAE as a legitimate treatment option for appropriately selected patients with knee osteoarthritis.
For patients who continue to experience significant knee pain despite conservative treatment, GAE may offer an additional option before considering more invasive procedures.
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