YOGA AND ARTHRITIS

San Francisco's Moscone Center is this years' host to the annual American College of Rheumatology/Arthritis Related Healthcare Professionals Scientific Meeting, which is expected to draw about 14,000 rheumatologists and health professionals. Over the course of the nearly weeklong conference, some 2,000 scientific papers will be presented, covering therapies in the works and advances into a complex disease that occurs in dozens of forms. Several of the first studies to be released focused on one of the most crippling forms rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an autoimmune disease that affects approximately 20 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million Americans. RA causes chronic inflammation of the joints, the tissues around the joints, as well as in other organs in the body, causing pain and permanent disability if left untreated.

In the United States, the incidence of RA had steadily declined in both men and women from 1955 to 1994. That 10 year trend led researchers to assume that the incidence of the disease was continuing to drop in recent years. But when Dr. Sherine E. Gabriel, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Mayo Clinic, and her team looked at more recent data, they found that from 1995 to the beginning of 2005, the number of American women with RA increased by nearly half from 36.4 per 100,000 in the previous 10 years to 54 per 100,000. Over the same two decades, the incidence for men remained virtually unchanged, going from 28.6 to 29.5 per 100,000. The rate of RA in the overall population increased from 0.85 to 0.95 percent. 'These rates would apply to the entire U.S. population,' said Hilal Maradit Kremers, M.D., associate professor of epidemiology at the Mayo Clinic and study co author. 'Based on this new data, the estimated number of people with RA in the U.S. is probably higher than 1.2 million.'

The researchers aren't sure what is causing the increase, but suspect that environmental or possibly hormonal factors may be playing a role. Studies have shown a strong link between smoking and an increased risk for RA, while other studies suggest an association between the disease and diet, alcohol consumption, coffee intake, and body mass index (BMI), but a causal relationship hasn't been proven. Many researchers believe the disease may be triggered by one or more infectious agents, though none have been identified. 'This is a significant finding and an indicator that more research needs to be done to better understand the causes and treatment of this devastating disease,' said Dr. Gabriel.

More news from the conference includes a study by Swedish researchers that confirms previous findings suggesting that RA raises the risk of heart attacks. Marie Gunnarsson, a graduate student at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues used data on 7,954 patients in Sweden who were newly diagnosed with RA and matched them with 38,913 people in the general population. For over 10 years, the researchers followed the two groups, collecting information on heart attacks, heart related deaths and deaths from other causes. After adjusting for other conditions, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, they found that before their RA diagnosis, neither group was more likely than the other to have a heart attack. But after the diagnosis, the heart risks for the RA patients rose steadily. During the first 10 years with the disease, RA sufferers had almost double the number of heart attacks and heart related deaths. 'The fact that there is no increased risk prior to RA diagnosis suggests that there is something in the RA disease itself, such as inflammatory processes, that lead to this increased risk,' Gunnarsson said in a statement. She said measures to reduce inflammation, which has long been linked with heart disease and heart attack risks, may help reduce the heart risks in this population as well.

On a more positive note, scientists from John Hopkins University in Baltimore have discovered that people with RA can greatly benefit from a program of yoga poses, breathing and relaxation. For their study, researchers divided a group of 30 sedentary adults with RA into two groups: one group participated in an eight week yoga program and the other was put on a waiting list and served as the control. Those in the yoga group took two one hour classes per week, with the traditional yoga poses being modified to accommodate for limitations due to RA. Also included in the sessions were deep breathing, relaxation and meditation techniques.

Those who participated in the yoga program had significantly fewer tender and swollen joints than they did before beginning the class. The waiting list group saw no significant changes in their tender and swollen joint counts. 'We have previously reported that yoga helps people to feel better, and we wanted to make sure it wasn't harmful to arthritic joints. So, we were glad to find that there actually seems to be improvement in joint symptoms for RA patients,' said Steffany Haaz, MFA, and recipient of the Arthritis Foundation grant that funded the study. 'The next big question is figuring out how and why yoga might be having this effect, since it is such a multi faceted activity.'

By Madeline Ellis

THE LATEST YOGA AND ARTHRITIS NEWS, FROM IT IS YOGA