Osteoarthritis as a disease of mechanics
By D. Felson. Osteoarthritis and Cartilage, 2012
640 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mechanics means relating to or caused by movement or physical forces. In this paper, I shall contend that OA is almost always caused by increased physical forces causing damage to a joint. While examples of joint injury causing osteoarthritis are numerous, I shall contend that most or almost all osteoarthritis is caused in part by mechanically induced injury to joint tissues. Further, once joint pathology has developed, as is the case for almost all clinical osteoarthritis, pathomechanics overwhelms all other factors in causing disease progression. Treatments which correct the pathomechanics have long lasting favorable effects on pain and joint function compared with treatments that suppress inflammation which have only temporary effects. I shall lastly contend that the mechanically induced joint injury leads to variable inflammatory responses but that the role of this inflammation in worsening structural damage in an already osteoarthritic joint has not yet been proven.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Rheumatology, Surgery
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20b19675a3cfeaf7832978f58c27e218ded0dbf7
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In Biomedical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Knee osteoarthritis has doubled in prevalence since the mid-20th century (2017, background): “Substantial evidence indicates that knee OA is proximately caused by the breakdown of joint tissues from mechanical loading (4) and inflammation (5), but the deeper underlying causes of knee OA’s high prevalence remain unclear and poorly tested, hindering efforts to prevent and treat the disease.”