What is Osteoarthritis?

I don’t know about you but the term, osteoarthritis, didn’t really enter my vocabulary for the first approximately forty years of my life. And it wasn’t Trivial Pursuit, or Scrabble, or any game show that brought it into my consciousness. It was my painful knees. The same knees that had served me faithfully up until my forties began to hurt. Now, I guess I always figured it was inevitable that my legs would begin to “go” on me at some point. The thing is though, I had gotten into pretty good physical condition. And I had the time and desire to play basketball, volleyball, ultimate frisbee, and tennis to name a few. Not to mention all those 5K races with their finish line beer parties.

Anyway, osteoarthritis is also commonly called degenerative joint disease, and you’ll see those terms abreviated as OA and DJD respectively. Another, less common term for it is osteoarthrosis. Taking the word apart, ‘osteo’ refers to bone, ‘arthro’ to the body’s joints and ‘itis’ means inflammation. Inflammation, of course, generally causes pain and that’s what can happen in our knees and hips and in just about any other joint that gets a lot of use. Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis and is seen primarily in adults. This gives a clue as to why it is also known as degenerative joint disease. You see there are just plain more adults. And the number of older adults is growing, too. And of course we’re all encouraged to be active. So sort of like the ball joints in your car’s front end, our human body’s joints get worn down as time and miles go by. What is happening in osteoarthritis is that the cartilage in our joints deteriorates. In our healthy joints, where weight-bearing bone meets weight-bearing bone, the hard and slippery cartilage keeps the movement smooth. Healthy cartilage helps absorb the shock from pounding forces while permitting bones to glide over each other. When the cartilage is worn away or damaged, pain and stiffness results from bone rubbing directly on bone. Over time the joint can become deformed, bone spurs (osteophytes) may grow, pieces of bone or cartilage may chip off and remain in the joint space. All of this producing more damage and more joint pain.

In my situation, the years of running, jumping rope, basketball, etc. lead to my knees starting to ache and swell. Fortunately, because osteoarthritis is a large and growing problem, there are a lot of remedies that physicians can recommend and or prescribe to help those of us who suffer from knee pain. Disclaimer: Osteoarthritis and degenerative joint disease refer to a medical condition and as such should be attended to by a medical doctor. If you have joint pain, or any concern about your health, see a doctor about it. That’s what I did.