WEDNESDAY, May 31, 2023 (HealthDay News) — For patients with chronic coronary artery disease, colchicine is associated with a reduced incidence of total knee replacement (TKR) and total hip replacement (THR) versus placebo, according to a study published online May 30 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Michelle W.J. Heijman, Ph.D., from Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and colleagues examined whether colchicine reduces TKRs and THRs in an exploratory analysis of the Low-Dose Colchicine 2 randomized trial involving 5,522 patients with chronic coronary artery disease at 43 centers in Australia and the Netherlands. Participants were randomly assigned to 0.5 mg colchicine or placebo once daily (2,762 and 2,760 patients) during a median follow-up of 28.6 months.

The researchers found that TKR or THR was performed in 2.5 and 3.5 percent of patients in the colchicine and placebo groups, respectively, during the trial (incidence rate, 0.90 versus 1.30 per 100 person-years; hazard ratio, 0.69). Similar results were obtained in sensitivity analyses when patients with gout at baseline were excluded and when joint replacements that occurred in the first three and six months of follow-up were not included.

“We showed that colchicine, 0.5 mg daily, was associated with a lower incidence of TKR and THR compared with placebo in patients with chronic coronary artery disease,” the authors write. “This suggests that colchicine may slow the progression of osteoarthritis, but this needs to be confirmed in an appropriately designed prospective placebo-controlled trial.”

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