Chronic Bone and Joint Disease

In past blogs I have discussed auto-immune diseases including some of the arthritides like rheumatoid and psoriatic, but the large bulk of chronic skeletal disease is the so-called degenerative variety including osteoarthritis and spinal disc disease. This group of diseases is a major cause of disability, surgery and medical expenses, currently at 20% of medical costs but increasing rapidly in our aging population. Projections of need for hip and knee replacement are staggering, and these procedures are expensive, typically a total cost of $50,000.

Joint replacement has a high success rate but many do need modification or even repeat replacement. Spine surgery for disc disease has a very high failure rate. In fact, a leading cause of spine surgery is prior spine surgery. Altered biomechanics after surgery leads to failure of adjacent discs and need for more surgery.

Reasons cited for this explosion of degenerative joint diseases are: more older people; more inactivity; more obesity. All are true but there's much more, and it's something amenable to remedial action as I'll discuss in a future blog.