ARTHRITIS BEATEN TODAY: ANSWERING YOUR MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS-IS AGE A FACTOR? WHAT CAUSES ARTHRITIS?
Not really. That’s a question usually asked by elderly individuals. Actually, people of all ages have responded perfectly, even many well over 80 years old. Although arthritis becomes far more common with advancing age, even very young children are sometimes afflicted. Children as young as eight years of age suffering from juvenile onset arthritis have responded perfectly.
What causes arthritis? It seems to be initiated by the immune system’s desire to eliminate particles of damaged or unhealthy cartilage from the body. Those cartilage particles may result from physical damage or from invading organisms that have attacked the joints. Diseases like rheumatic fever and maybe even the flu virus are often responsible. (Remember those aching joints that sometimes come with a flu attack?).
In the question about rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, an immune response develops and macrophage cells are then directed to attack those fragments of damaged or unhealthy cartilage. But the macrophages that are instructed to gobble up the cartilage don’t distinguish between unhealthy and healthy cartilage and eventually a major onslaught against the healthy cartilage in the joints begins as well.
Unfortunately, there’s no ‘stop button’ or ‘end program’ command in the immune system and the attacks continue even after all the unhealthy or damaged cartilage has been destroyed. They often become more severe with time because more and more of the memory T-cells that direct the macrophage attacks are generated. Thus, left unchecked, arthritis usually continues to worsen with the passage of time. Severe rheumatoid arthritis is believed to sometimes shorten the life span by as much as twenty years.
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Tags: Arthritis
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 3:49 am and is filed under Arthritis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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