Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 28, 1995 TAG: 9511280035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINE RUSSELL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
She has struggled for 18 years with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and undergone 30 surgeries, as doctors replaced knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, thumbs and knuckles and fused bones in her ankles and feet. At age 28, the blue-eyed blonde has a young face but her hands - scarred from repeated surgery and twisted in pain - are those of an old woman.
``It rules my life,'' says Redding, ``but you learn to live with it.'' She managed to get a junior college degree over a five-year span, but her dream of becoming a broadcaster has been thwarted by the disabling disease that has forced her to live at home with her mother in Brooklyn.
Redding's case is extreme, but 40 million Americans of all ages live with the pain and disabling effects of arthritis. ``It affects children, adolescents, young adults, people in their middle years, and people in their older years,'' emphasized Robert Kimberly, a Cornell professor who has treated Redding since she was 11 years old.
``The problems Susie has encountered and the things she has had to deal with are quite generic,'' said Kimberly, who directs the Multipurpose Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Disease Center here. ``Arthritis is serious, and it has an enormous impact on those who have it. It also has an enormous impact on those of us who don't have it.''
In fact, the medical, social and economic impact of arthritis is expected to grow dramatically as increasing numbers of baby boomers age, warned experts at an American Medical Association briefing here last week.
Cases of arthritis and other rheumatic conditions will jump by an estimated 50 percent during the next 25 years, with the number affected rising to about 60 million Americans, said Chad Helmick, chief of epidemiology in the Aging Studies Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since the disease severely disables one in five arthritis patients, the increase in the number of cases of arthritis is also expected to push the number of severely disabled people in the country from 7 million today to 12 million in 2020, he said.
Arthritis ``is very common now and is the leading cause of disability in the United States. But it will affect a lot more of us in the future and affect our quality of life,'' said Helmick. He noted that arthritis was more common and disabling than heart disease, cancer or diabetes, but remained ``underappreciated and understudied,'' in part because it presented itself as a ``slow motion event.''
Currently about 15.5 percent of Americans suffer from some form of arthritis, including nearly half of the population 65 years and older. Arthritis is more common in women, in people living in rural areas and in those with lower income and education. Rates are similar for whites and blacks, but are lower among Hispanics and Asians, said Helmick.
A new study published last week in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatology estimated that the annual economic cost of arthritis was $149.4 billion. ``The impact is enormous, equivalent to a chronic, severe recession,'' said study author Leigh F. Callahan, an associate professor at the Thurston Arthritis Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She noted that, in comparison, in the severe U.S. recession in 1981-82, real GNP fell by 2.2 percent.
While total cost attributed to arthritis remained steady from 1960 to 1980 at .7 to .8 percent of GNP, Callahan said it jumped to 2.5 percent in 1992.
Nearly half of the estimated cost, or $72.3 million, is in direct medical care, particularly for hospital costs associated with hip and knee replacements and nursing home costs of elderly Americans. The rest, $77.1 billion, is attributed to indirect costs due to lost wages of disabled arthritis patients who are largely 45 to 64 years of age, she said.
by CNB