By David Liu PHD

Thursday Nov 29, 2012 (foodconsumer.org) -- Y. Yamagishi at Protein Chemical Co. Ltd. in Tokyo, Japan and colleagues conducted an animal study and found evidence that suggests that supplementation of both methionine and glucosamine can effectively suppress adjuvant arthritis.

For the study published recently in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine, researchers tested the effect of individual methionine and flucosamine and combined administration of methionine and glucosamine on the adjutant arthritis in rheumatoid arthritis rats.

What the researchers did was first induce adjuvant arthritis in female Lewis rats by injecting Freund's complete adjuvant (FCA) into the right hind paws, and then administered methionine in the dose of 200 mg/kg body weight/day and/or glucosamine in a dose of 400 mg/kg/day for 21 days. 

It was found that co-administration of methionine and glucosamine suppressed  the swelling of left hind paws, which did not receive FCA injection and the arthritis score.  

This supplementation of methionine and glucosamine signfiicantly suppressed "synovial hyperplasia and the destruction of the cartilage surface and articular meniscus of the knee joints of FCA-injected right hind paws" and suppressed "the increase in the levels of nitric oxide, prostaglandin E(2) and hyaluronic acid in the plasma of rats with adjuvant arthritis."

When methionine and glucosamine was used individually, the suppression of arthritis was moderate only.

The researchers speculated that methionine and glucosamine suppressed the progression of adjuvant arthritis (identified as swelling of joints and arthritis score), "possibly by synergistically inhibiting synovial inflammation (identified as synovial hyperplasia and the destruction of the cartilage surface and articular meniscus) and the production of inflammatory mediators."

Adjuvant arthritis is an experimental immune disease that is believed to have many features as human rheumatoid arthritis does and it is often used to study the anti-inflammatory properties of potential chemotherapeutics. 

The study suggests that combined supplementation of methionine and glucosamine may help rheumatoid arthritis.