The inability to move your joints, intense pain, swelling or stiffness in a particular joint or joints is called Arthritis. In this generally swelling and tenderness of one or more joints takes place.
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It makes life tougher, although there isn’t just one kind of arthritis. There are different kinds of arthritis that can happen to people of any age, out of which osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis are the most common. Generally it happens to people in their old age.
Causes of Arthritis:
Just like there is no single type of arthritis. It cannot be said that Arthritis has a single cause, different types of arthritis can have different causes or may result from a combination of causes: The common causes are:
- If you’ve recently suffered an injury it can lead to degenerative arthritis
- If you suffer from chronically abnormal metabolism, this can cause gout or pseudogout.
- Arthritis such as in osteoarthritis is generally inherited.
- Infections may also lead to arthritis.
- Diet and nutrition can also exacerbate arthritis related issues.
- Studies show us that women are generally more prone to develop rheumatoid arthritis while men are to gout.
- Obesity is also considered one of the reasons to develop arthritis due of excess stress in knees, hips and spine.
Types of Arthritis:
There are more than 100 types of Arthritis. But they can be categorised into 7 groups.
- Inflammatory Arthritis:
Inflammation is a part of our body’s defence mechanism. It occurs to enable healing. However in case of Arthritis it occurs for no reason and damages joints resulting in stiffness, swelling and pain to the affected joint. Ankylosing spondylitis, reactive arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis are its few of the examples.
- Mechanical or Degenerative Arthritis:
It occurs when the cartilage that covers the ends of bones in a joint is destroyed. Cartilage facilitates smooth gliding of bones, but it’s loss leads to degeneration of bones.
To compensate the loss of cartilage our body starts to remodel the bone which ultimately leads to the undesirable bony growths known as osteophytes which later on results in osteoarthritis.
- Soft tissue musculoskeletal pain:
This type of pain is generally a result of injury and overuse. Soft tissue musculoskeletal pain impacts tissues rather than joints and bones.
- Back pain:
If it occurs in Spine it can be caused by Osteoarthritis or Spondylosis.
- Connective tissue Disease:
In this generally joint pain and inflammation occurs in the tendons, ligaments and cartilages. Few of the examples of CTD includes dermatomyositis, scleroderma, lupus and sjogren.
- Infectious Arthritis:
These are caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi which may enter the human body through various means such as food poisoning or contamination, sexually transmitted disease (STDs) and blood to blood infection like hepatitis C.
- Metabolic Arthritis:
Increased uric acid accumulation in blood leads to its transference to a space between joints. There it takes a needle like shape and causes attacks of joint pain aka Gout attack.
Prevention / Cure to Arthritis:
A healthy and balanced diet along with the appropriate physical exercise and yoga routine can help the suffering individual to reduce the severity of the symptoms and to cure the disease. Below are the few key measures which an individual can follow to aid the healing of the disease;
- Adding food items that nourishes joints and helps reduce the inflammation such as fish, beans, whole grains, nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables and olive oil. Along with this the patient should also avoid eating processed food, added sugar items, refined carbohydrates and limiting salt intake can actually help body to heal faster.
- Having an active physical lifestyle also supports an individual to overcome the pain and the sufferings caused by the disease. Walking, swimming, cycling and an active yoga schedule may help a lot.
- Including herbal supplement with anti-inflammatory properties and other medicinal properties also helps to recover faster. Turmeric, ginger, black pepper, chamomile are few of the herbs which helps body to speed up the recovery process.