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Physical therapy (PT) and corticosteroid injections are two options that are used widely to treat patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). To compare their relative efficacy, U.S. researchers randomized 156 patients with symptomatic and radiographic knee OA to receive either PT or steroid injections. Patients who had received either intervention in the preceding 12 months were excluded. During the 1-year study, patients in the injection group received a mean 2.6 injections; patients in the PT group had a mean 12 treatment visits.
The primary outcome was improvement on the WOMAC scale, which assesses both pain and function (score range, 0–240, with higher scores indicating worse OA). In intent-to-treat analysis, improvement at 1 year favored P…