Affect of Diabetes, Heart Disease on Knee OA Less Than Expected

An international team of researchers, seeking to determine the relationship of diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD) to knee osteoarthritis (OA), examined two cohorts with more than 7,000 individuals. A pre-proof of their work, “Metabolic osteoarthritis – Relation of diabetes and cardiovascular disease with knee osteoarthritis,” has been published in the November 27, 2020 edition of Osteoarthritis and Cartilage. It is the largest longitudinal study on this topic.

Researchers used data from the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study and the Osteoarthritis Initiative, where they found baseline information on participants’ self-reported diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

From the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study, 6,020 knees of 3,021 participants were included. In the Osteoarthritis Initiative, 8,645 knees of 4,339 patients were included.

Co-author David Felson, M.D., M.P.H., professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, and the University of Manchester and Central Manchester Foundation Trust, Manchester in the UK wrote:. “In two very large cohort studies, we did not find that those with diabetes or with self reported cardiovascular disease were at increased risk of developing radiographic or symptomatic osteoarthritis in their knees. While obesity increases the risk of both forms of OA, this study confirms that diabetes and CVD are not independently associated wth radiographic osteoarthritis and also do not seem to increase the risk of symptomatic OA.”

Laura Kuusalo, M.D., Ph.D., with the Division of Internal Medicine at the Centre for Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the University of Turku and Turku University Hospital in Finland and co-author on the study, summarized the study’s results to OTW, “This study shows that if diabetes and cardiovascular disease have influence on the development of knee OA this effect is very small—too small to detect even in a large longitudinal study. We thought that, knowing obesity is one of the strongest risk factors for knee OA, that these diseases may only share risk factors, which the study confirmed. So no, the findings did not surprise us so much. However, it would be interesting to see what the results would be if we studied osteoarthritis of the hand.”