What Pain In The Joints Indicates For The Rest Of Our Body.

The pains of osteoarthritis are real, and some cases may have even been preventable.

Osteoarthritis is a common issue that plagues most people who experience chronically painful joints that have lost a fraction of their original functions. We feel it as we age and as our bodies degenerate.

It’s considered degenerative because there is a sustained erosion of joint cartilage that leads to the pain and the loss of function.

However, what we have to realise is that our joint cartilage is in a constant state of dynamic equilibrium. The rates of synthesis and destruction are nicely balanced in an ideal situation, such that young kids don’t necessarily feel any effects of an accelerated destruction rate leading to osteoarthritis that early on in life. (Rheumatoid arthritis, on the other hand, is a completely different story altogether.)

Much as the cell populations in our body are nicely regulated by the process of autophagy, where useless cells are programmed to die and be decomposed so that new cells can take the place of those dead cells, our cartilage also has to go through a similar process.

Ditto for our bones. They’re also in a constant state of flux.

Therefore, there is that idea that there will be biological activity in the body that supports the synthesis of new cartilage and another type of biological activity in the body that supports the destruction of damaged cartilage. These activities have to be equal in magnitude so that the cartilage can be in a healthy state all the time.

From the perspective of collagen destruction

The matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzymes in the body are key players for collagen degradation. Some MMPs are produced in larger amounts at higher inflammation levels (acute inflammation), so it does make sense that a flare up that a rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patient suffers will result in a greater amount of joint destruction than when there is no flare up.

In osteoarthritis (OA), though, MMP activity is also involved in joint degradation. In one instance, we have the synovial cells in the joint lining producing higher levels of MMPs when a joint is subjected to constant irritation, strain or injury.

This higher concentration of MMPs in the blood is necessary for one’s recovery, because what they do is to digest away damaged cartilage, such that the chondrocyte cells in the joint are able to synthesise new cartilage to replace the damaged areas.

And there we see the idea of the balance.