What Is Osteoarthritis?
Osteoarthritis is the most common form of the potentially debilitating rheumatoid disease. The disease finds it’s most victims in adults age twenty-five or older. In 2006, nearly twenty-one million Americans were living with this form of arthritis. Also known as degenerative joint disease, osteoarthritis attacks the bone’s cartiledge. While healthy bone cartiledge makes it easy for bones to glide over and pass each other and absorbs the shock of physical movement, once the cartiledge finds itself under siege by osteoarthritis however, the surface layer of the bone cartiledge deteriorates and begins to wear down. Eventually, the bones beneath the cartiledge effected by osteoarthritis will start to rub together, swell, start pain, and loss joint motion.
Osteoarthritis patients regularly experience pain in the joints and limited mobility. But unlike other members of the arthritis family, like rheumatoid arthritis for instance, osteoarthritis does not spread it’s havoc into other areas of the body like the tissues of the skin, the lungs, the eyes, and the blood vessels. Instead osteoarthritis goes for the hands, particularly the ends of the fingers and thumbs, the spine, especially the areas around the neck and lower back, the knees, and the hips.
What Do Osteoarthritis Patients Look Like?
Osteoarthritis is most common in older people, but the condition has been known to manifest itself in young people suffering from a joint injury, joint malformation, or a genetic joint defect. Striking both men and women equally, osteoarthritis in people age forty-five and younger is most common in men, with the disease becoming more common in women older then forty-five. Excessive weight and professions that stress the joints are both factors that can flare the onset of osteoarthritis.
No matter how common, the effects of osteoarthritis reach behind the joints and cartiledge that attacks. Osteoarthritis can not only alter lifestyles, but bank accounts, too. Some lifestyle chances associated with osteoarthritis include depression, anxiety, helplessness, limited activity, limited employment potential, expensive medical treatments, and lost wages.
How Is Osteoarthritis Treated?
Osteoarthritis has four goals:
