Should We Think of Rheumatoid Arthritis as an Age-Related Condition?

There are medical conditions that occur only in old age, and there are medical conditions, such as cancer, that can occur at any point in life, but more so in the old. Then there are grey area conditions that may occur to some greater degree in later life, or be worse in later life, but this is by no means widely appreciated. Where does the autoimmune condition of rheumatoid arthritis sit in this spectrum? Unlike cancer, it is not commonly thought of as an age-related disease, even though it is certainly affected and made worse by the processes of aging. This point is discussed in today's open access commentary and the paper to which it refers. One of the more interesting aspects of this work is the background of poor mechanistic understanding that attends research into the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Despite considerable effort, it remains a poorly understood condition. The immune system is complex, and there as, as of yet, no very straightforward evidence for a specific malfunction of the immune system to trigger the condition. Available treatments take the form of quite blunt approaches to the suppression of chronic inflammatory dysfunction of the immune system, such as TNFα inhibition, and have meaningful long-term side-effects related to impairment of the necessary immune response to infection and damage. Biological ageing: a promising target for prevention and management of rheumatoid arthritis Researchers have used US National Health and ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs