Cortaflex

[Lgd]

Some interesting information about Cortaflex for those unsure about it's efficacy.

Michigan State University vet school have carried out a double blind randomised trial of cortaflex in 8 riding horses chosen for their varied levels of asymmetric movement (i.e. lame). Half given placebo, half given active treatment. All labels were removed from the bottles and replaced with numbers to prevent any biased findings.

Gait analysis used for objective analysis. Data collected using motion analysis (markers placed on the horses' body over the joint areas, tracked using a video camera) and ground reaction times (the force at which the foot contacts the ground and length of contact period). Data collected at the beginning and end of each two week treatment period.

When compared with placebo, periods with cortaflex resulted in a statistically significant increase in left-right symmetry of vertical ground force reaction, increase in hock joint range during motion and hock joint energy generation during stance, with these changes being seen consistently across the test horses.

Only small numbers used but apparently the results were so dramatically different between placebo and active treatment that it is significant. I believe they are following up with bigger trial numbers. The study was not sponsored by the manufacturers and the trial design means that the investigators had no idea as to which horses were on active treatment. I haven't managed to get hold of the full paper yet as it is in an American Vet publication, hopefully I will get a hard copy soon so I can give more details.

[anuvb]

Hi LgD,

I'd be interested in seeing the full article - do you have the full reference? A guy in our lab is working on this at the moment and needs as broader spectrum of papers as possible for his PhD thesis. It's not coming up in Pubmed when we put in a search and I can't find a full reference to the paper on the internet (though admittedly I haven't spent ages looking).

On a final note - (you'll probably hate me for this). I'm just being devils' advocate - I think it is important people get a balanced view....

As you have already said the numbers are way too low. But more importantly, the trial time is far too short. Cartilage has a particularly low turn over rate due to it being very low in cells and virtually no blood supply, couple this with large size of the molecules of GS and Ch (cortaflex components) the likelihood of the molecules targeting the joint pharmacologically is pretty slim. If you take this into consideration then for marked differences to be seen in such a short trial period biologically it would be virtually impossible for the cartilage to have improved to a point where you are seeing measurable differences in the ground reaction forces and joint symmetry.

I (and my colleagues) would argue that there has to be a different mechanism for the GS&Ch working rather than by rebuilding the cartilage itself which would result in changes in ground reaction forces and the joint symmetry. It would have been interesting to see if similar effects were seen in a population of horses treated with more conventional treatments such as pain killers, alongside the Cortaflex treated horses. in fact, others separate studies using pain killers have illustrated similar results on much large populations of "volunteers".

[galadriel]

Hmmm...One person's experien ce with cortaflex (me) indicates that it really does help the joints. My farrier complained that Kat shook while he was shoing her hind legs, like it was hard for her to hold them in that position. (Obviously, I usually picked her feet then put them down, so I sadly hadn't seen this.) I worked on strengthening her legs, but it didn't help; it was the stretch, not the strength. So I started doing daily stretches with her, and didn't get very far. She just couldn't really stretch her hind legs far at all, even after a month & a half of working on it. I saw almost mo improvement despite working with it daily.

I started her on cortaflex, and within about a month she started showing significant improvement at stretching. She's now willing to let me pull her legs forward & back a fair distance, and hold them there, without argument. I have to say, I like the stuff!

Sadly, when I was hurting in my hips myself, the glucosamine/chondroitin I took didn't help at all--it turned out it wasn't my actual joints that were hurting! (I was later diagnosed with bursitus.) Sigh...