Knee OA Patient Numbers to Soar (Biloine Young @ OTW)
If current trends continue, nearly 6.5 million Americans between the ages of 35 and 84 will be diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis (OA) within the next ten years according to research presented at the November 2011 American College of Rheumatology meeting in Chicago and reported by PRWEB. People between the ages of 45 and 64 will account for more than half of the cases.
Senior author of the study, Elena Losina, Ph.D., co-director of the Orthopedics and Arthritis Center for Outcomes Research at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the lead investigator of the study, said, "The large number of newly diagnosed cases of knee osteoarthritis in younger individuals will lead to continued increases in the use of total knee replacement. Furthermore, these data are consistent with the recently observed tripling of total knee replacement use in 45 to 65 year old persons in the U.S."
Researchers from the Brigham and Women's Hospital used data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—called the OAPol model—to estimate the number of newly diagnosed knee OA cases in the U.S. during two decades: the 1990s and the 2010s.
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