Pain-zapping pellets are being fired into the knees to take the discomfort out of arthritic joints.
The tiny spheres — made from gel-like plastic, each 30 or more times thinner than a credit card — increase in size once injected into the knee.
They work by blocking rogue blood vessels containing new nerve fibres that develop with the onset of osteoarthritis and contribute to the pain.
A pilot study involving five patients who failed to respond to other non-surgical treatments showed that injecting an arthritic joint with thousands of these microspheres can cut symptoms by a third or more, with long-lasting effects.
Four of the five had a significant improvement in pain, which was still apparent three months later, and, overall, symptoms more than halved, according to the study carried out by the Vascular Institute of Virginia in the U.S. and reported in the current issue of the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology.
The pellets are already used to treat fibroids, non-cancerous growths that develop in, or, around the womb. Once the fibroids lose their blood supply, they disappear.
Researchers now believe that the same approach could work for osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, affecting millions of people in Britain.
