Video: Finding the Right Treatment for People With Knee Arthritis Pain

Living with chronic pain can profoundly affect quality of life. One of the most common types of chronic pain that severely interferes with people’s ability to go about their normal activities is knee pain from arthritis. Millions of people in the United States, particularly older adults, experience this condition that leads to swelling and stiffness in the knee and makes it difficult to get up, walk, or climb stairs.

To date, health care providers don’t really know what the best treatment for knee arthritis pain is. Treatment guidelines often conflict, and there is limited data on which treatments may be best for different individuals. Claudia Campbell, Ph.D., and her team at Johns Hopkins University are tackling this issue through a large clinical trial comparing current treatment approaches, including both conservative and nonsurgical interventional procedures, that are commonly used in clinical settings. “We are interested in understanding which people might benefit most from which treatment,” Campbell explains.

The team is comparing the effectiveness of different treatments and treatment combinations, including: an online program that teaches pain coping skills; the use of pain medications; and nonsurgical procedures. They assess how well a given treatment works in a specific person with pain, and if that individual doesn’t show improvement after a certain time, they switch treatments or add a second treatment to see if that will lead to a better outcome. At the same time, the researchers are gathering a large amount of information about people with pain to see if they can identify individual characteristics that will help them predict which treatment may be most promising for a given person.

“We’re really hopeful that this will translate into improved pain treatment for everyone,” Campbell says.

Campbell’s study is part of the NIH HEAL Initiative^®’s Pain Management Effectiveness Research Network. This program evaluates how a range of pain management approaches work for various conditions in order to identify strategies that can be implemented in real-world settings. This can mean comparing treatments that are already able to be used/prescribed, so these findings can very quickly be acted upon to change patient care and experience.

To be able to conduct such clinical trials, however, researchers need enough people with a given condition to participate in their studies. “We really like to encourage people to look for trials, look for studies, and participate,” Campbell says. By taking part in clinical trials, participants may not only improve their own wellbeing, but also the future wellbeing of other people with similar conditions.

Ongoing clinical trials for pain are listed on the HEAL website or at ClinicalTrials.gov.

Watch Campbell’s full video interview.