Glucosamine sulfate was no better than placebo in reducing symptoms and progression of hip osteoarthritis. International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number: ISRCTN54513166.

Latent class growth analysis applied to longitudinal data of patients with hip OA identified five distinct trajectories of pain. More studies are needed to externally validate these findings.

Statistical modeling of the appearance captures the patterns of variation in projected femoral morphology as visible on DXA images. We showed that these descriptors of subtle aspects of shape and density of the hip contain information about clinical status which common radiological measures do not. The presented results warrant further careful study of the method as a monitoring tool in clinical trials.

Although proposed and debated for several years, open trial data are not widely made available for studies of glucosamine for OA, especially those sponsored by industry. Currently, there is no good evidence to support the use of glucosamine for hip or knee OA and an absence of evidence to support specific consideration of glucosamine for any clinically relevant OA subgroup according to baseline pain severity, BMI, sex, structural abnormalities or presence of inflammation.