It is felt by joint pain often linked to the change of weather: osteoarthritis marks the destruction of the cartilage of certain joints. It affects 10 million French people.
Temperatures and rain are playing tricks on us at the start of the year. While some see their seasonal allergy start earlier than expected, others complain of joint pain that fluctuates depending on the weather. This is the case for people with osteoarthritis. A point on this pathology with doctor Martin Ducret, doctor, and journalist at Doctor’s Daily.
franceinfo: Eexplain to us what is osteoarthritis?
Martin Ducret : This is the destruction, mainly of the cartilage, of a joint, such as the knee or the hip. This causes pain and eventually joint stiffness. Its diagnosis is quite simple thanks to a good clinical examination and the help of standard x-rays. It should be known that in the event of osteoarthritis, two states follow one another at an unpredictable rhythm: on the one hand a variable daily discomfort with moderate pain, on the other hand intense inflammatory pain crises with swelling of the joint. This joint disease is the most common: it affects 10 million French people.
What are the causes of osteoarthritis?
The first cause is aging. But heredity also plays a role, as do sequelae of trauma but also excessive mechanical stress such as overweight or certain diseases such as diabetes.
Does the weather really affect osteoarthritis?
Indeed, I find that a number of my patients with osteoarthritis report having more pain in wet or cold weather. To find a well-founded answer, I therefore searched the scientific literature and according to a serious study published in Nature in 2019, yes, a rainy and windy day seems to increase the painful feeling, but it is still minimal.
How to relieve a patient who complains of osteoarthritis, in particular of the knees or hips, the most frequent?
In the event of an inflammatory flare-up, anti-inflammatories are used in tablets or in the form of infiltration with a needle directly into the joint, all associated with rest. For everyday osteoarthritis, it is above all non-drug measures that must be adopted to slow the progression of the disease: regular practice of suitable physical activity, with low mechanical stress, such as brisk walking, swimming or the bike. You must then lose weight in case of excess and therefore balance your diet.
I systematically refer my patients to a podiatrist for a gait analysis and to a physiotherapist to begin rehabilitation sessions. In the second line, I propose intra-articular infiltrations of hyaluronic acid, a kind of motor oil for joints or even PRP, platelet-rich plasma whose functioning I explained in a previous column.
In case of failure of all these treatments, when the discomfort becomes too disabling, there remains the surgical option with the fitting of a prosthesis.