Understanding osteoarthritis patterns: an examination of aggregate osteoarthritis (original) (raw)

In order to understand some of the sex differences in osteoarthritis, it is pertinent to examine the influence body size may have on arthritis. As mentioned earlier, the medical literature has reported a positive correlation between osteoarthritis and body weight, especially obesity (Tepper & al., 1993). Anthropologists, however, have not fully examined whether there may be a correlation between body size and osteoarthritis scores. This author conducted two studies that found a positive correlation with body size and muscle marker scores (Weiss, 2003; and, for this reason and others, thinks that there may be a confound with body size and osteoarthritis scores as well. Anthropologists Zumwalt & colleagues (2000) examined lower and upper limb bones from non-human primates and found that muscle markers correlated with body weight and did not vary with locomotor type, raising the question of whether research on human remains should also take body size into account when using muscle markers and other bone characteristics, such as osteoarthritis, to reconstruct activity patterns. Human upper limbs are unique because they are free of locomotor responsibilities and, as a result, are not weight bearing. This lack of weight bearing by human upper limbs may decrease the influence of body weight and size on upper limb osteoarthritis scores, as it did for muscle markers . Weiss (2003) examined human upper limbs and found they correlated with upper limb size; though, these correlations became insignificant when controlling for age and sex. Weiss (2003) hypothesized that future studies may show that human lower limb muscle markers have a greater correlation with size than do human upper limb muscle markers. Then, in her next study, showed that there is a greater correlation with body size in the human lower limb than in the upper limb. Most anthropologists now agree that osteoarthritis cannot be effectively used to reconstruct specific activities. Osteoarthritis may or may not be more useful in understanding broader cultural differences, such as huntergatherer versus agriculturalists (Bridges, 1990; Jurmain, 1990 Jurmain, , 1999 Larsen, 1982). Ju-