Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on February 3, 2006
Rheumatology 2006 45(3):248-249; doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kei275
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
EDITORIAL |
The relationships of musculoskeletal disease to age, pain, poverty and behaviour
MRC Health Services Research Collaboration, Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Canynge Hall, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2PR, UK.
Correspondence to: p.dieppe@bristol.ac.uk
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
In a recent letter to the editor of Rheumatology I pointed out that the Bone and Joint Decade is just one of several current decades of action trying to improve world health, including the decades of health in ageing; pain control and research; the eradication of poverty; and behaviour in health-care [1]. I suggested that, as the agendas of each of these four other decades is highly relevant to bone and joint disease, we needed some joined-up thinking. So, what are the relationships between age, pain, poverty, behaviour and musculoskeletal problems, and what other issues should be added to the list?
Age is obvious. The incidence of many major musculoskeletal diseases, such as osteoarthritis and osteoporosis, is age-related, and in older people bone and joint diseases are the major cause of the very high