medwireNews: Study results from the Osteoarthritis Initiative suggest that diabetes is associated with faster degeneration of knee cartilage among patients with osteoarthritis (OA).
Type 2 diabetes is “reported in a high proportion of knee OA cases,” and the conditions share common risk factors, but “the underlying pathophysiology and biologic relationship between these two diseases is not yet completely understood,” Jan Neumann (University of California, San Francisco, USA) and study co-authors write in Osteoarthritis and Cartilage.
The team found that cartilage deterioration occurred approximately twice as fast in 151 patients with OA and diabetes compared with 159 matched OA patients without diabetes, with average magnetic resonance imaging-based T2 relaxation times of 1.77 versus 0.98 ms, over 2 years of follow-up
And when different areas of the knee were analyzed separately, cartilage deterioration in all compartments except the patella was significantly more rapid among patients with diabetes than those without.
Neumann and team caution that their study had a number of limitations, including lack of information about diabetes duration and whether participants had type 1 or type 2 disease.
medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare. © 2018 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group