Garlic has many uses. I use it as a natural blood thinner, and to lower blood pressure and lipids. This is a recent study published in the HerbalGram from the American Botanical Council on its use in osteoarthritis
Re: Garlic Relieves Joint Stiffness in Knee Osteoarthritis in 12-week Study
Salimzadeh A, Alipoor E, Dehghani S, et al. The effect of 12‐week garlic supplementation on symptom relief in overweight or obese women with knee osteoarthritis. Int J Clin Pract. December 2018;pii: S1063-4584(18)31582-6. doi:10.1111/ijcp.13208.
Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common joint disease worldwide. It causes considerable pain and debility. There is a need for low-cost, safe, effective therapies. The commonly prescribed medications do not provide adequate relief. The chronic nature of OA makes the costs and adverse effects of these medications particularly problematic. The mechanisms of pain and dysfunction in OA are multifactorial. Natural products therefore have the possibility of affecting multiple aspects of the disease process. Garlic (Allium sativum, Amaryllidaceae) has a long history of use for many conditions. There is a robust body of evidence supporting its use as an anti-inflammatory therapy. Constituents of garlic have several known bioactivities, including cytokine modulation, immune cell stimulation, antioxidant action, and analgesic effects, that could affect OA. However, research on the use of garlic in OA has been limited. This paper investigates the use of garlic in overweight or obese women with knee OA; obesity increases the risk of OA, and increased weight is associated with greater OA pain.
This single-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-design study involved eighty female patients with mild or moderate knee OA who were recruited from the Sina Hospital Rheumatology Clinic in Tehran, Iran. The included patients were 50-75 years old, postmenopausal, and had a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 40. Exclusion criteria were severe pain; scheduled for surgery; receiving intra-articular therapies in previous three months; allergic to garlic; diabetes or other endocrine or chronic disorder; on a weight-loss protocol; smoker; or using hormone replacement therapy, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), other analgesics, chondroitin sulfate, omega-3 fatty acids, warfarin, or other anticoagulants.
In summary, 12-week garlic supplementation may have improved knee OA symptoms in overweight or obese women, but the results were for the most part not statistically different from placebo.
Until tomorrow…