It is often difficult for a consumer to know the real effectiveness of a product for a specific need! In the health care context, it is not always easy to know the real efficacy of a food supplement when it has not been tested under rigorous conditions. Eric Troncy and his team have addressed this problem for the specific case of osteoarthritis treatment in dogs and cats.
Dr. Eric Troncy, professor at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the Université de Montréal, and his team were interested in the real effectiveness of dietary supplements recommended by veterinarians for the treatment of osteoarthritis. To do this, they used a systematic review, which is a method of synthesizing rigorous, structured and reproducible knowledge that aims to verify whether the scientific literature contains sufficiently solid evidence to confirm the effectiveness of the treatment. They therefore looked closely at 57 articles related to dietary supplements used in dogs and 3 in cats. The results of their approach show that only omega-3 supplements seem to have analgesic efficacy in the context of osteoarthritis in dogs and cats. This is not the case for other supplements studied in their scientific approach. The authors hope that their approach will remind us of the essential place of scientific proof in the recommendations and conditions of marketing of food supplements.
