Osteoarthritis-;a condition in which the protective cartilage on the ends of bones breaks down-;may more than double the risk of speedy progression to accumulating severe long term conditions (multimorbidity), finds a 20 year study published in the open access journal RMD Open . And there seem to be 4 different speeds of progression to multimorbidity, the findings indicate. Persistently low levels of physical activity, a high calorie diet, plus chronic low grade inflammation may help to explain the link between osteoarthritis and the risk of accumulating other long term conditions, suggest the researchers.
Although the exact causes aren't known, injury, age, family history, and female sex are all thought to be contributory factors to the development of osteoarthritis , which affects more than 500 million people globally. Around 7 out of 10 of those affected are likely to have other long term conditions, but it's not clear how quickly these develop, or how severe they are, say the researchers. In a bid to find out, they drew on continuously collected healthcare data for the Skåne region of Sweden (around 1.
4 million residents) and extracted diagnoses for osteoarthritis and 67 common long term conditions. They focused on those aged at least 40 on 31 December 2007, who had lived in the region since 1998, and who had been newly diagnosed with osteoarthritis between 2008 and 2009. This added up to a total of 9846 people with an average age of 66 (58% women).
Each of these cases .