Chicken Collagen Tested As Rheumatoid Arthritis Treatment

From the barnyard to your medicine chest: there's some provocative evidence suggesting that a protein extracted from cartilage in chicken breasts may help relieve symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

We're not suggesting you try this at home just yet, but researchers at Anhui Medical University in China found that 41 percent of patients taking capsules of something called chicken type II collagen, a protein in connective tissue, reported a significant decrease in morning stiffness and pain plus improvements in joint function.

Before you get too jazzed up, we have to point out that patients did much better on tablets of methotrexate, a generic medicine prescribed for moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. Fifty-seven percent of the methotrexate patients reported improvements on a set of standardized criteria used in the six-month-long study.

 

The study, which enrolled 500 patients, didn't compare the collagen with a sugar pill, which leaves open the possibility that a placebo effect could explain some of the improvement. The tested dose of methotrexate—10 milligrams a week—was also on the low side, which could narrow the gap in effectiveness.

Both criticisms were made of an similar but smaller study published by some of the same researchers last year.

Also, patients in both groups were allowed to take diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory medicine, in addition to the other medicines. Researchers say both groups complained of gastrointestinal discomfort, but the complaints were fewer and milder among the patients taking chicken collagen.

Chicken collagen is sold as a nutritional supplement not as a drug. We found bottles of the stuff for about $20 each. For $32, you can buy more than enough methotrexate to match what the patients in the study got each month.

The findings were published online by the journal Arthritis Research & Therapy. The work was funded by the Shanghai Materia Medica Bioengineering Institute and Shanghai Baolong Pharmacy Limited Company. The researchers said they had no conflicts of interest.