Glucosamine Essay

Glucosamine is a chemical compound that naturally occurs within the body. Its main function is to help keep our cartilage healthy. Glucosamine is also available as a supplement. Glucosamine was first prepared as a supplement by Georg Ledderhose in 1876. It was created by hydrolysing chitin (a component commonly found in the shells of crabs, lobsters, and shrimps) with concentrated hydrochloric acid (Roberts, 1992). that it is able to reduce inflammation. This occurs by inhibiting the Interleukin-1 beta induced NF-κB pathway, which reduces the synthesis of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2). Reducing COX-2 synthesis is important because COX-2 is an enzyme that causes inflammation and pain (Largo et al., 2003). Both of these symptoms are common in patients with Osteoarthritis, a very common degenerative joint disease. This disease causes pain, stiffness, dysfunction and inflammation of the joint because it leads to the thinning/degradation of the cartilage surrounding the ends of the bone (Kean et al., 2004). This can reduce ones quality of life by limiting the ability to walk or take part in physical activity, since it is often very painful to bare weight on the effected joints. Furthermore, since it is a degenerative disease, this means the symptoms
Having the knee in a semi-flexed position is the best orientation to calculate the space that is present. However, Pavelká et al., (2002) was the only study to mention the position they had the knee in, which was extension. None of the other studies mentioned what position they had the knee in when the radiographic imaging was done. Therefore, there is a greater possibility that systematic errors occurred in the research articles. Furthermore, since we do not know which studies had the knee in which positions, it makes it harder to compare and contrast the