Glucosamine Supplementation Reduces All-Cause Mortality: Study

> This population-based prospective cohort study included 495 077 women and men (mean (SD) age, 56.6 (8.1) years) from the UK Biobank study. Participants were recruited from 2006 to 2010 and were followed up through 2018. We evaluated all-cause mortality and mortality due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, respiratory and digestive disease. HRs and 95% CIs for all-cause and cause-specific mortality were calculated using Cox proportional hazards models with adjustment for potential confounding variables.

> Regular glucosamine supplementation was associated with lower mortality due to all causes, cancer, CVD, respiratory and digestive diseases.

I am guessing they didn't control for lifestyle, etc. Someone who takes glucosamine either works out heavily and supplements (and probably watches their diet), or had joint surgery, and falls into the first group to some degree.

Edit: Yea, reading the study, I don't see anything about controlling for fitness level. Running and caring about one's diet alone would account for this effect without glucosamine.

Yes - cartilage. If you eat chicken or something like that, eat the cartilage. You can do this on pre-cooked chickens you get from Sam's Club / Costco. If you eat chicken breasts only (which a lot of health-conscious people do), you don't get this benefit.

I talked to Dr.Yang Jwing Ming (one of the few Kung Fu practioners with a Western phd and he said eating cartilage is one of the best ways to help reduce the risk of arthritis. Oh, and pig ears too, but I never tried that, being a Westerner and all.

This title is not the title of the study.

"Associations of regular glucosamine use with all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a large prospective cohort study"

This does not mean it reduces all cause mortality. This is correlation, not causation.

To take this further, there might be no limit to what you could correlate to some degree with all-cause mortality, especially since it might be heavily correlated to financial status, which would correlate to an enormous amount of other behaviors (eating avocados, owning a swimming pool, having a high ceiling, having your own bathroom, having a gym membership, organic food, name brand laundry soap, not taking public transportation, better healthy insurance, smoking habits, coffee quality, living in a low crime area, etc etc). Determining cause and effect takes a lot of control variables.

> Yea, reading the study, I don't see anything about controlling for fitness level.

Doesn't table 2 and 3 show that they examined a bunch of relevant covariates including physical activity, smoking, alcohol use, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, statin and aspirin use? It's at least "something" at the very least and I'm not sure how you missed it if you were actually reading the study because it's very hard to miss.