Dr. Tomiko Katsumoto

But rheumatoid arthritis can be profoundly disabling.

The amount of pain, the amount of dysfunction, a lot of patients aren't.

For example, if it's affecting your hands, you're not able to open jars or grasp things or using your joints the way you normally would like to.

It can be very painful in terms of if it affects your foot joints.

It feels like you're walking on marbles or glass in some cases.

Sadly,

This was a very exciting trial.

I'm a huge fan of randomized controlled trials.

I think this is our highest level of evidence.

This is a group, our Dutch colleagues, they ended up randomizing a group of patients with, but they actually did two studies in parallel.

They did one in rheumatoid arthritis and they did one in osteoarthritis.

To clarify, it was a metabolic associated osteoarthritis.

So patients that tended to have metabolic syndrome were maybe overweight.

So those patients with OA.

Yes, they are helpful in that they minimize any confounding bias in terms of the fact that people are put into two different groups.

There's an equal chance of whatever intervention working or not.

And comparing to a placebo provides a robust comparator.

And basically what they did was they put them through a lifestyle intervention.

And this is absolutely thrilling to me because I'm a huge fan of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

Just to quickly provide their six pillars of lifestyle medicine, diet is number one.