If you’ve ever struggled with knee pain while tying your shoes, getting into a car, or walking down stairs, you’re not alone.
Osteoarthritis (OA) in the knee is a common problem that makes everyday activities difficult and painful. But now, researchers are testing a surprising new way to treat it—by stimulating a nerve in the ear.
A team led by Dr. Kosaku Aoyagi at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), in collaboration with researchers from Harvard Medical School and Boston University, has found early signs that sending gentle pulses to the ear could help reduce knee pain.
Their study, recently published in Osteoarthritis and Cartilage Open, explores how stimulating the vagus nerve through the ear might help people with OA knee pain feel better.
Dr. Aoyagi, a physical therapist and assistant professor at UTEP, explained that current treatments for OA knee pain often provide limited relief and can come with unwanted side effects.
Most of them also focus on treating the damaged knee tissue itself. But Aoyagi’s approach is different—he’s targeting the nervous system, specifically how the brain and body respond to pain.
At the center of this approach is the vagus nerve, one of the body’s most important nerves.
It helps manage the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for calming the body and supporting functions like digestion and relaxation.
When the body is under stress, the sympathetic nervous system takes over, which can worsen pain. In people with knee OA, the balance between these two systems may be off.
By gently stimulating the vagus nerve through a technique called transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), Aoyagi hopes to help restore that balance.
The treatment involves placing a small device on the outer ear, where it sends mild electrical pulses to the auricular branch of the vagus nerve.
In the pilot study, 30 people with knee pain tried the treatment for 60 minutes. Afterward, 11 of them reported feeling noticeably less pain. While the results are early and not yet conclusive, they’re encouraging.
“This is a promising step toward developing a treatment that can help people with knee osteoarthritis without the side effects of drugs,” said Aoyagi.
The treatment isn’t available to the public yet. The next step is a larger study where some participants will receive the real treatment and others a placebo, to better understand how well it works. If successful, this could lead to a new, non-invasive option for managing knee pain—right through the ear.
If you care about pain, please read studies about vitamin K deficiency linked to hip fractures in old people, and these vitamins could help reduce bone fracture risk.
For more information about wellness, please see recent studies that Krill oil could improve muscle health in older people, and eating yogurt linked to lower frailty in older people.
