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Radial Extracorporeal Shock Wave Therapy for Relief of Arthralgia in Rheumatoid Arthritis
Author(s) -
Liu Yiming,
Zhang Tingjie,
Feng Yi
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
pain practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.899
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1533-2500
pISSN - 1530-7085
DOI - 10.1111/papr.12608
Subject(s) - medicine , extracorporeal shock wave therapy , erythrocyte sedimentation rate , visual analogue scale , rheumatoid arthritis , adverse effect , population , extracorporeal , arthritis , adjuvant therapy , physical therapy , surgery , cancer , environmental health
More than one‐third of the population with rheumatoid arthritis requires adjuvant analgesic treatment after antirheumatic therapy. In addition to analgesics, another option is radial extracorporeal shock wave therapy ( rESWT ), a novel physical therapy that has been successfully used in the treatment of many types of chronic soft tissue pain. We report a series of 15 patients who suffered from arthralgia after being on disease‐modifying antirheumatic drugs for more than 3 months. Participants received rESWT for 3 months as an adjuvant therapy. Compared to the pretherapy baseline, follow‐up at 3 months post‐therapy revealed a significant reduction in resting state visual analog scale scores from 2.90 ± 0.74 to 0.80 ± 0.79 ( P = 0.004), active state visual analog scale scores from 5.70 ± 1.33 to 2.20 ± 0.63 ( P < 0.001), morning stiffness duration from 2.25 ± 0.79 to 1.05 ± 0.69 hours ( P = 0.004), disease activity score with 28‐joint counts based on erythrocyte sedimentation rate from 6.34 ± 0.72 to 4.19 ± 0.59 ( P = 0.001), and Health Assessment Questionnaire scores from 10.20 ± 2.35 to 5.00 ± 2.62 ( P = 0.005). The pre–post changes in erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C‐reactive protein were not statistically significant. By the end of treatment, 11 participants stopped analgesics completely; the other 4 participants were on a smaller dosage. No severe adverse effects related to rESWT were observed. To our knowledge, this is the first report using this therapy to treat arthralgia in rheumatoid arthritis.

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