WEDNESDAY, July 30 (HealthDay News) -- Frankincense may help reduce the symptoms of osteoarthritis, according to a study of 70 patients.

An enriched extract of the "Indian Frankincense" herb Boswellia serrata was used in the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study. Patients who took the herbal remedy showed significant improvement in as little as seven days. The compound caused no major adverse effects and is safe for human consumption and long-term use, according to the study authors.

The findings were published in the July 29 edition of Arthritis Research & Therapy.

The extract used in the study was enriched with 30 percent AKBA (3-O-acetyl-11-keto-beta-boswellic acid), which is believed to be the most active ingredient in the B. serrata plant.

"AKBA has anti-inflammatory properties, and we have shown that B. serrata enriched with AKBA can be an effective treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee," study leader Siba Raychaudhuri, a faculty member of the University of California, Davis, said in a BioMed Central news release.

"The high incidence of adverse effects associated with currently available medications has created great interest in the search for an effective and safe alternative treatment," Raychaudhuri said.

B. serrata has been used for thousands of years in traditional Indian medicine. This is the first study to examine the effect of an enriched extract of the plant.

Osteoarthritis -- the most common form of arthritis -- commonly affects weight-bearing joints such as the knees and hips, along with the hands, wrists, feet and spine. Symptoms include pain, stiffness and limited movement.

More information

The Arthritis Foundation has more about osteoarthritis  .

FRIDAY, July 11 -- (HealthDay News) -- Older adults may get a needed mood boost from a prescribed antidepressant, but they're also at increased risk for bone fractures, a growing number of studies suggest.

In one of the latest reports, Leslie Spangler, a researcher at Group Health, a Seattle-based health plan, found that antidepressant use in postmenopausal women, who averaged 64 years of age, was linked to an increased risk of fractures of the spine and other sites.

"Our study didn't show any strong association between antidepressants and wrist fractures and hip fractures," she said. "It did find an association with spine fracture."

Those women on antidepressants had a 30 percent increased risk of spine fracture, she said, and a 20 percent increased risk of any type of fracture.

Spangler's team based its findings on a review of data from more than 93,000 women enrolled in the large Women's Health Initiative Observational Study. First, the researchers looked at antidepressant use, then they looked at the incidence of fractures. The findings were published in the May issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

In an earlier study, Dr. David Goltzman, director of the McGill Centre for Bone and Periodontal Research at McGill University in Montreal, looked at data from an osteoporosis study that included more than 5,000 randomly selected people, including 137 who took antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, daily. The researchers found that daily SSRI users had twice the risk of bone fracture as those who didn't take the drugs.

Serotonin is a brain chemical linked to depression. It's also involved in the physiology of bone, said Goltzman, who added that if you change that system, you can get low bone density, boosting fracture risk. His research was published in 2007 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Other research has also uncovered a link between depression itself and an increased risk of fractures.

Goltzman said he and his colleagues are now looking at teens who take SSRIs, to see if there are any effects from the drugs on growing bones. The researchers want to determine if there's a genetic predilection for osteoporosis, the brittle bone disease that can lead to fractures, that's induced by the antidepressants.

While the studies suggest an association between antidepressant use and fractures, no research has found a cause-and-effect relationship, Spangler said.

Charlie McAtee, a spokesperson for Eli Lilly and Company, which makes the popular SSRI Prozac (fluoxetine), agreed with Spangler that "the current data does not allow a definitive conclusion that fluoxetine contributes significantly to the risk of osteoporosis and fractures in fluoxetine-treated patients."

The link has been seen before, McAtee said. "The Prozac label does list osteoporosis as an event observed in clinical trials," he said. "This is listed as a rare (less than 1 in 10,000) occurrence."

Until more is known, Goltzman offered this advice: "I would advise individuals on SSRIs not to stop their medication if they are receiving the drugs for valid reasons. They should, however, strongly consider seeing their physician to be evaluated for osteoporosis, including having a bone density test done."

To help reduce the possibility of bone loss, whether you take antidepressants or not, bone health experts at the Mayo Clinic offer the following suggestions:

• Get enough calcium. All men and women older than age 65 should try to get 1,500 milligrams of elemental calcium a day.
• Get enough vitamin D. Men and women should get at least 800 international units (IU) daily.
• Exercise. You should couple strength-building with weight-bearing exercises, such as walking, stair climbing and skipping rope.
• Be sure to get soy in your diet. The plant estrogens in soy help maintain bone density and may reduce the risk of fractures.
• Don't smoke -- it leads to bone loss.
• Don't drink alcohol to excess. More than two drinks a day may reduce bone formation and limit the body's ability to absorb calcium.

More information

To learn more about osteoporosis, visit the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

THURSDAY, July 9 (HealthDay News) -- Using replacement ligaments from cadavers for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) may have a failure rate as high as 24 percent in active patients under the age of 40.

The finding, from researchers at the Mississippi Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center, which were to be presented Thursday at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine annual meeting, in Orlando, Fla., raises the question as to whether other alternatives would be better for younger ACL patients.

An estimated 800,000 ACL tears occur each year in the United States, with the number of ACL replacement surgeries correspondingly high.

Golf legend Tiger Woods may be the most recent well-known casualty. He recently announced that he would be undergoing ACL surgery this year, requiring him to sit out the rest of the 2008 season.

"The ACL is one of the ligaments in the center part of the knee that stops the shin bone from sliding forward," explained Dr. Derek K. Lichota, an assistant professor of surgery at Texas A & M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a sports medicine physician at Scott & White. "When you rupture it, the majority of patients' knees become unstable so, routinely, especially for young, active people, we recommend reconstruction."

The choices for reconstruction include a ligament from the patellar-tendon bone, the hamstring tendons or a ligament from a cadaver.

For this study, 64 patients aged 40 or older who had undergone ACL reconstruction with a replacement ligament from a cadaver were followed for at least two years.

Almost one-quarter (23.4 percent) of the reconstructions failed, meaning the patient had to undergo a second reconstruction because of additional injury, graft failure or low scores on a test of function.

The failure rate in an older group was only 2.4 percent.

While the findings may raise some red flags, a number of questions go unanswered, Lichota said.

"They don't tell us if the patients were braced postoperatively," he said, or when the second rupture occurred or the failure rates in specific subgroups of patients.

Also, the researchers did not describe the particular technique used for each replacement. "My concern is that we may be comparing apples to oranges," said Dr. William Levine, chief of sports medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia in New York City.

More information

Visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine for more on ACL reconstruction.