Word: boning
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Another hint comes from the observation that women with strong, healthy bones--the kind that are least susceptible to the brittleness of osteoporosis--are at greater risk of developing osteoarthritis. (Nature is often just not fair.) Once again, doctors suspect that a complex interplay of mechanical and biochemical factors is at work. Strong, healthy bones can support a heavier load. They also tend to replace old bone cells with new bone cells at a pretty fast clip. But somehow the biochemical signals that are responsible for the bone's increasing turnover rate trigger even greater damage to the cartilage...
...other way around? Is it the damaged cartilage that gets the degenerative process started by sending aberrant signals to the bone? "At this point, it would be a mistake to fight bitterly over whether osteoarthritis starts in the bones or cartilage, because in the end there may be different forms of the disease," says Dr. Bjorn Olsen, a cell biologist at Harvard University. "In some cases, it may start in the bone. In others, it might start in the cartilage...
None of these processes occur in isolation. "Everything is failing together," says Dr. David Felson, a rheumatologist at Boston University. "That includes bone damage, the responses to that, muscle weakness, inflammation of the lining of the joint and ligament disruption." It follows that to be successful, any treatment will have to deal with all these factors...
...synovium that line and lubricate the joints. The runaway immune response clogs the synovium with infection-fighting cells that release proteins called cytokines. These are compounds that fuel inflammation. The synovium becomes engorged with new blood vessels and begins to grow, kudzu-like, penetrating and further damaging cartilage and bone...
...BONE FUSION: Fusing bones together with pins or plates can eliminate the pain caused by a badly damaged joint; the joint, however, will never bend again...