Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein

later.

I also have a lot of women who get worked up for rheumatologic conditions because they have this new onset joint pain many times, but x-rays that don't look abnormal yet.

And they're just having, you know, a lot of polyarthralgia.

And I sometimes think that is just related to systemic inflammation and

Even, you know, some of the earlier studies from the Women's Health Initiative did show reduction in number of and severity of pain and, you know, painful joints with hormone therapy that included estradiol and then even like rebound or worsening of joint pain with withdrawal of that.

And there are like some systematic reviews and analyses that don't clearly show a relationship of joint pain and use of menopausal hormone therapy.

And I think even the Menopause Society has a statement like that on their website, like, you know, that we need more research in this area.

And I'm studying that now.

But I do think we need to understand that better.

But there's got to be something if women have this really disparate relationship.

There's some data coming out that seems to relate.

There was a large study that looked at...

women and men over time, I think it had like 9,000 subjects in it, about 5,000 women in it, and they followed them over time with sex hormone levels and rates of arthritis.

And they did see a correlation with lower testosterone levels in women over time in terms of risk of knee and hand arthritis, but they did not see that correlation in men.

So yeah, we're seeing some, I think, more research about testosterone in women

later in life potentially being also related to knee and hand arthritis, which are, of course, very common sites.

I'm trying to get at the answer to that.

I'm doing a study or trying to launch a study that we've done a lot of the preliminary parts for that will really look at early changes in cartilage in women and men in the early 50s, as well as correlating with testosterone and estradiol and progesterone levels.

using some of those models we built from the ACL research, actually, on these models we make.

And if anyone is listening to this and wants to be my research fairy godmother and wants to give me $3 million to solve this arthritis in men versus women, I have the study.