BOUNTIFUL—Last summer Brittney Pingrey woke up one morning with extreme pain in her hand. Pingrey hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary. She was in pain but wasn’t sure why. It threatened to affect her love of embroidery and eventually even her job.

“I have a history of arthritis and I’m like, ‘it’s just acting up,’” Pingrey said. “I thought I’d just ignore it.”

That went on for five months, she said. “I couldn't lift anything. I couldn’t grab anything. I was dropping things. So I went to see an orthopedic surgeon. They did a steroid injection and they said if it didn’t work the only option for me would be to have a total joint replacement of that thumb.”

The recovery would take over a year, said Pingrey. “So I scheduled the surgery. This was in October. I work at Holy Cross Hospital (Davis) in the registration office. I was taking a patient down to have a procedure and I noticed on our internal screen they were advertising lower dose radiation treatment for osteoarthritis.”

Pingrey said she really didn’t want to have the joint replacement. “I really took this as a sign that I needed to see what Dr. (Robert) Harris could do for me. It never crossed my mind that radiation would treat something like this.”

When she met with Dr. Harris, Pingrey said he told her the treatment worked best when there is still tendon or cartilage at the joint. “So we did an X-ray and it came back that I qualified for the treatment.”

At first Pingrey said she was a little skeptical. “I told my family whether the treatments work or not. I'm still in the same boat as I was before.”

Pingrey had her first treatment called Low Dose Radiation Therapy (LDRT) just before Thanksgiving. “It was super easy,” she said. “I was there for 30 minutes because it was my first treatment. The treatment time was all of 45 seconds. By the Monday after Thanksgiving I’d had two treatments. I was able to pick up gallons of milk. I had no pain.”

“The majority of patients we treat with radiation are cancer patients,” said Harris, a radiation oncologist at Holy Cross Hospital – Davis. “Over the years we’ve treated a variety of conditions, benign conditions with radiation. It’s never been a focus because of the volume of cancer patients we see, unfortunately."

One of the conditions they’ve been treating quite frequently in Europe is osteoarthritis, he said. “Because of their success it’s starting to migrate to the U.S. and it’s becoming more and more available here.”

Harris said he went to a training program with some of the experts from Germany and England. “They showed us their best practices and we’ve been starting to offer it here in Utah.”

It’s become well received, he said. “With arthritis there’s limited options. In the beginning when you have very mild arthritis you take some Motrin or Tylenol and then as it gets more advanced you start taking injections which can be invasive and painful. Sometimes when they inject the joints it can cause some damage to the cartilage and then eventually you end up going to surgery with joint replacement.”

What radiation does is it kind of fills that middle gap in between occasional medications and surgery to try and control the pain and give patients a non-invasive way of getting quality of life back for a time.”

The initial course of treatment is six visits, said Harris. “Basically twice a week over three weeks or three times a week over two weeks. The visits only take about 20 minutes. Many patients start to notice pain improvement over the course of those visits. We typically see patients back three months later and about 78% to 75% will have significant pain relief at that three month visit.”

Another 30% will achieve additional benefit from a second course of therapy, he said. “The duration of effect is usually anywhere from three months to three years depending on the patient and how severe their condition is.”

It allows them quite a bit of time of pain relief without having to go do invasive surgical procedures, Harris said. “When you cut down the inflammation in the joint it allows that joint a chance to heal.”

“Eventually down the road I will have to have surgery to replace that joint,” said Pingrey. “I’m grateful that I’m having the extension so I don’t have to have the pain of surgery right now. It gives me time to wrap my head around it.”