alt Hacker NewsSemaglutide improves knee osteoarthritis independant of weight loss
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My psychiatrist is really interested in how it affects anxiety and depression as he has now seena number of improvements from a bunch of patients (including myself) who use the drug. Im on meds for both and only after i started on monjourno did i feel a signifigant change. The food cravings gone due to the nuerological effects but the stress levels lower as it seems to be impacting seratonin levels in ways as you increase dose.
Independent of weight loss, semaglutide (Ozempic) improves knee osteoarthritis by cartilage restoration, in both the mouse model and a small randomized clinical trial.
Old thinking was the benefit of GLP-1 drugs (like Ozempic) was solely from weight loss, however studies are showing there are other unique benefits. It's probably that semaglutide reduces inflammation allowing the body to repair and improves mitochondrial function in cartilage cells.
If it can somehow restore spinal disc function, I'm gonna start snorting the stuff.
Funny, after semaglutide I developed moderate arthritis in my MTP(foot) joint.
I wonder if it was gout because it seemed to come on fast. They say semaglutide shouldn't cause gout but I'm not convinced. It has some very weird effects on my hydration. I drink a fair amount of water, but specifically at night I now have to urinate a dozen times throughout the night and wake up with my mouth almost dried shut.
I've lost 10% of my bodyweight(probably >1/3 muscle, sadly) which is great and it's taking the load off my joints, but man this foot thing is a bummer. I need to find a sports Dr because most foot docs seem to take the "just stop running/hiking and switch to biking/swimming" approach which doesn't work for me.
Title is misspelled, should be “independent”.
I have to chime in here. The full text is paywalled but if you have a subscription or institutional access the devil is in the details.
The "pilot study" the authors performed was an n=20 with 30% dropout, meaning 14 finished the study, 6/10 in the non-semaglutide arm and 8/10 in the semaglutide arm. They did not include participants who dropped out in their final analyses which is a big methodological flaw. I could go on about their choice in and measurement of outcomes, but suffice to say with only 14 participants these results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Further, they did extensive molecular biological studies in mice. There have been MANY (dozens) of murine (mouse) studies showing beneficial effects of various compounds / interventions on mouse knee osteoarthritis. None of them have translated into a therapy for the human disease. Mice live 2-3 years and have very different knee biomechanics than humans.
Appreciate the authors investigative efforts, but more confirmatory studies are needed before I'll be injecting semaglutide into my knee.
Currently there is a torrent of research on the benefits of GLP1s. This raises doubts as most are not backed by solid hypothesis. The same happened almost a century earlier when aspirin was explored as super drug. A key metric is the NNT (number needed to treat), ie how many people should take the drug for one to meet the primary goal.
GLP-1 and GIP are both hormones the human body makes in the gut. The famous drugs are mimicking those hormones. This is more akin to taking supplemental testosterone than it is to taking Fen-Phen or whatever.
I wonder if the real problem is that we are really sick, and we just don't realize it: weight and eating too much processed food, so anything that improve these 2 aspects has also a lot of uncorrelated benefits.
There are other clinical trials, such as one for Orforglipron, which are also studying this specifically.
Most of the results here are in mice, but they apparently did a small pilot study in humans:
https://www.chictr.org.cn/showprojEN.html?proj=176336
To the extent that there are results, they're paywalled. But, oddly, the entire article appears to be posted in the supplemental information section:
https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2026.01.008/attachme...
From Figure 1, the effect size in mice was fairly large.
Pages 9 and 10 give a very brief description of the human trial. It looks like they did not make any effort to disentangle effects due to weight loss from effects independent of weight loss in humans. The humans in the study group had a 17% increase in knee cartilage thickness, and the dose used was (see page e3):
"Participants receiving SG treatment initiated with a dose of 0.25 mg in the first week, and increased the dose in a stepwise manner each subsequent week until reaching the target dose of 0.5 mg/week (incremental steps of 0.125 mg)."
AIUI this matches the current recommended starting dosage for diabetes and is considerably lower than the dosages used for weight loss.
I'm always wary of such claims as it is not unusual for companies to extend the use of their drugs, after all the patent expires in some years
if this actually prevents expensive knee replacements, the ROI for insurers should be a no-brainer. the challenge is the high monthly cost vs long-term surgery savings it's hard to model when people switch carriers every few years and take the health benefit with them.
I hope this goes through clinical trials before my joints degrade completely
Typo in the title - “independant”
did anyone actually read the article to figure out if these results are at all reliable?
is Big Pharma going to invest in any of the other peptides or is it just one and done?
because the underground grey market seems to be snowballing for all kinds of diseases and symptoms
just very dangerous without any regulation
I'll probably be downvoted for this but honestly it seems like a lot of the benefits of semiglutide are literally just benefits of fasting.
One thing we have to remember is that we don’t know the long term effects of these things. Just like we don’t know the long term effects of the MMR 2. The first infants vaccinated with that are only in their fifties or early sixties. For all we know, the measles vaccine insta-kills people at 70.
We don’t know anything. We are complete ignorant floating through the void. If I drop a rock and it falls I cannot tell if the next rock I drop will fall. We can’t know. We are unknowing. Anything could happen.
At what point do we start to re-evaluate and re-test old assumptions about how much weight/caloric restriction impacts things? It seems unlikely that a molecule that slots into receptors in the pancreas also does something(?) to cardiac muscle [1], addiction [2], and now osteoarthritis(!).
This feels like a stretch to say that this happens independent of weight loss, and much more like we may have underestimated the impacts of weight loss on all of these other facets of life.
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12431743/
[2] - https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/04/ozempic-addic...