The People of the Johnston County Knee Osteoarthritis Study
Source: Arthritis Care & Research, September, 2008
Major finding: 1 in 2 people will get osteoarthritis in their lifetime.
A new arthritis study released by a team of investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered a much higher risk of knee osteoarthritis than experts had previously known. Here are the demographics of the research group.
The study was made up of 3,200 citizens of Johnson County, N.C. Anyone who was over the age of 45 was eligible to join the study, whether they had arthritis or not. At the start of the JoCo study, in 1990, participants averaged 61 years of age. There were slightly more women than men; roughly 80 percent of people in the study were white, and 20 percent were black.
Joanne Jordan, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and orthopedics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her team worked hard to recruit African-Americans because arthritis had not been well studied in that ethnic group.
“There was a real gap in racial disparities in what we knew,” Dr. Jordan said. “We wanted to know if there were differences in arthritis in blacks and whites and to see if there was a difference in prevalence between the two groups.
Most of the participant population were married and had at least a high school education. Nearly two-thirds were overweight or obese, a percentage that was higher than the national average at the time but that now matches prevalence of obesity nationwide.
Many of the participants live in rural and suburban areas, and a fair number are farmers.
-- Brenda Goodman
For more on the study:
* Exclusive Arthritis Today interview with the researchers
* Details on how the study was conducted
