Ayurveda drug offers hope for osteo-arthritis

Ayurveda drug offers hope for osteo-arthritis

Anuradha Mascarenhas

Pune, January 31: Decks have been cleared and ethical approvals taken for the final phase of the multi-centric trial to test an ayurvedic drug formulation for the treatment of osteo-arthritis (OA). This unique trial is sponsored by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)s ambitious New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) project.

This purely herbal ayurvedic drug formulation, which does not use metals, is being tested at four places— Centre for Rheumatic Diseases (CRD) Pune, KEM Hospital and Swami Prakash Anand Ayurved Research Centre at Mumbai, Nizamuddin Institute for Medical Sciences (NIMS) Hyderabad and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.

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‘‘The CSIR had launched the project that aimed at supporting innovation-centred scientific and technological developments as a vehicle to attain for the country a global leadership position at least in some selected niche areas,’’ says Dr Bhushan Patwardhan, Director, School of Health Sciences, University of Pune and one of the project coordinators.

Ayurveda is one such niche area that needs to be developed in the modern context of evidence based medicinal system, says Dr Arvind Chopra, Director of CRD and one of the principal investigators of the multi-centric trial. The CSIR has allocated Rs 3.5 crore for NMITLI’s ayurveda project.

Wide-ranging and widespread national consultations, followed by stringent and rigorous system of screening, expert evaluation and assessment has identified herbal-based preparations for degenerative metabolic disorders as one of the NMITLI projects. A detailed project on ‘arthritis’ was evolved involving several national institutions and pharma industries.

The project was launched in 2002. A total of 450 patients will be screened. At Pune, some 30 patients with painful knee j"