A diagnosis of osteoarthritis means one thing: your joints have ongoing, degenerative cartilage damage. What causes this to happen is still not clear, but there are three categories that may put you at risk for OA:
1. Any trauma to your joints is likely, if not certain, to give you osteoarthritis. You may or may not notice it for years, but it will happen.
2. Your mother/father/grandmother/etc. having OA means you might have a genetic predisposition to get OA, but it depends. Some of it is how your body is put together or aligned, especially for weight-bearing joints such as knees and hips.
3. Getting old causes OA. Sometimes. You may or may not get it. We don't know why.
So we all have a clear idea of what OA is, here is the official definition. OA is "defined as a heterogeneous group of conditions that lead to joint symptoms and signs which are associated with defective integrity of articular cartilage, in addition to related changes in the underlying bone and at the joint margins." (Altman+ Osteoarthritis & Cartilage 1986)
In plain English, this basically means that anything that causes damage to the lubricating jello on the ends of your bones (called articular cartilage) will cause your joint to break down slowly, affecting not just the "jello" but the bone underneath and the entire joint structure.
One of the more important words in this definition is "heterogeneous". This implies that not just one thing causes these changes to the joint, but somehow they look the same when a doctor looks at it. This diversity is part of why we don't have a treatment for it. Just like with cancer, there will be some similarities between all the sub-diseases, but there will always be unique details which allow a treatment to work for some people but not others.
Up next: Treatment strategies for OA
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