Majority of the people suffer from joint disease. Unfortunately, many of them don’t know the difference between these three common joint diseases, namely Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis, and also Hyperuricemia, since their symptoms are alike. However, we can differentiate these diseases by conducting medical check-up.
First of all, let us learn a little bit about Osteoporosis, which came from two Greek words, namely osteo (meaning bone) and poros (meaning pore). Therefore, the word osteoporosis could be easily identified as porous bones. Osteoporosis itself is an age related disease where the strength of our bones to support our body weight decrease as we age. This condition increases the risk of a broken bone. Osteoporosis is hard to be detected. The most dangerous aspect from this disease is fracture, since debilitating chronic pain in the elderly caused by fractures can lead to early mortality and further disability. The most common osteoporotic fractures located at the wrist, spine, shoulder, and hip. This lead to vertebral collapse. The symptoms of vertebral collapse are sudden back pain with the loss of the nerve roots of the spinal canal below the lower end of spinal cord. When multiple fractures happen, it will lead to stooped posture, loss of height, and chronic pain. As the result, it will reduce the mobility of our body.
After we learn about Osteoporosis, let us take a look at Osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is a joint disease which that was caused by the breakdown of joint cartilage and underlying bone. The most common symptoms for Osteoarthritis are joint pain and stiffness. There are some risk factors of Osteoarthritis, such as age, body weight, genetic disorder, and the frequency of exercise. The chance is increasing not only as people age, but also for people who have excessive body weight. There are also people who have genetic disorders with deformed legs or knees, although their age is under 50 years old. The frequency of exercise also influences the chance of person to suffer from Osteoarthritis. People who exercise infrequently have higher chance to suffer this kind of disease, which leads to obesity. Thus this makes people become sloth, which cause people to gain more weight. This results in increased join stress, followed by cartilage deterioration, and finally, the inflammation of synovial membrane.
And now we come to the last disease, namely hyperuricemia. Hyperuricemia can be defined as an abnormality high level of uric acid in the blood, which cause pain in joints that occur from joint inflammation (gout). Uric acid itself is a ring structure which consist of four compounds, such as Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Hydrogen with the formula C5H4N4O3. There are many factors that play a role to cause hyperuricemia, such as genetics, insulin resistance, obesity, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. It is very important to realize that alcohol consumption is the most important factors.
To sum up, these three kinds of disease symptoms are alike, and after learning which factors cause them, we can now prevent it before it happens to us. In fact, all of these three diseases have one similar factor that potentially caused them, namely excessive body weight. In order to prevent them, we suggest to exercise frequently, or even do some sports. Experts recommend that the best sport’s type to prevent these kinds of diseases are cycling and swimming. These kinds of sports will reinforce our feet without giving additional burden to the feet itself. Hence, after we cycling or swimming for two months, our feet is able to support our body weight more.