3 Advanced Joint Injections to Combat Osteoarthritis Pain in Your Knees and Hips

You used to bound up the stairs two at a time, but these days just getting up them at all feels like a victory. From climbing steps to simply getting out of a chair, the impact that osteoarthritis (OA) in your knees and/or hips can have on your ability to function is sizable.

Unfortunately, knees and hips are often first joints in the line of fire when it comes to OA, which affects more than 33 million people in the United States.

As board-certified pain management specialists, both Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy understand the limitations and pain that can come with OA. To help our patients stay one step ahead of hip and knee pain, we offer several advanced joint treatments here at Apex Pain Specialists in Chandler, Arizona, which we review below.

What happens when OA strikes your knees and hips

To help you choose the right treatment for your goals, it’s helpful to review what’s happening in your joints when you have OA.

Also called a wear-and-tear disease, OA occurs when the protective cartilage inside your joints starts to break down over time. When this happens, you not only lose the protective coating over the bones in your joint, you can be left with loose cartilage fragments.

As a result, you develop the two hallmarks of OA: joint pain and inflammation. We’d also like to add stiffness to this list.

To combat these effects, we offer three different joint interventions, which we get into next.

1. Corticosteroid injections

One of the true workhorses when it comes to joint pain and inflammation are corticosteroid injections. These injections typically contain a local anesthetic for pain relief, as well as a steroid that combats inflammation.

Corticosteroid injections for knee and hip OA can be highly effective at reducing symptoms, allowing you to engage in some joint strengthening exercises that will help keep your OA at bay.

As for results, corticosteroid injections can provide months of pain relief, though results do vary from one patient to the next. Some patients can go a year or more without symptoms while others may only get a few weeks of relief.

2. Viscosupplementation

As we explained, when you have OA, the cartilage inside your joint breaks down, which allows your bones to rub together. To prevent this from happening, we offer viscosupplementation.

This approach restores the lubrication inside your arthritic knees with hyaluronic acid (HA), a naturally occurring substance in your body that excels at retaining moisture. In fact, a quarter teaspoon of HA can hold up to 1.5 gallons of water, so it makes for a great lubricant. 

3. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy

The ultimate goal when it comes to OA is to get your cartilage to regenerate, which is challenging. Thankfully, we're starting to solve this puzzle with regenerative medicine and orthopedic biologics.

At our practice, we’ve had great success helping patients with hip and knee OA with platelet-rich plasma injections. PRP, which is created using your body’s own resources, sets the stage for regeneration by releasing critical growth factors. 

Growth factors are signaling proteins that are essential for repairing and regenerating tissues. So when we inject a concentrate of them into your achy joints, they get to work to rebuild them from within.

As you can see, there are symptom-management solutions as well as regenerative ones when it comes to OA and we often use them in combination.

To figure out what's best for your hip or knee OA, we invite you to call our office at 480-820-7246 today to schedule an appointment. You can also use our online booking tool.