Hand osteoarthritis and diabetes – new relationships discovered

Hand pain has been associated with diabetes in people who have one or more joints with central erosions, says research published in Arthritis Care & Research. And a strong association was found between diabetes and the number of hand joints that were tender on palpation (ie when touched), but again only in those with erosive disease.
Experts set out to look into hand pain in 530 people (average aged 65 years) with radiographic hand osteoarthritis; 71% were women. They looked at erosive and non-erosive hand osteoarthritis.
More hand pain was associated with diabetes, lower age, being female, lower education status, family history of osteoarthritis, infrequent alcohol drinking, widespread pain, poor mental health and higher number of affected finger joints. Further analysis showed that diabetes was strongly associated with hand pain and number of tender joints in erosive hand osteoarthritis only.
In non-erosive osteoarthritis, lower educational status, having familial osteoarthritis and poor mental health were associated with hand osteoarthritis pain.
“An important finding of this study was the differences explaining hand osteoarthritis pain in non-erosive versus erosive disease,” the research team says. “The most remarkable difference was that diabetes was associated with both self-reported hand pain and number of tender joints in erosive osteoarthritis, whereas no associations [with diabetes] were found in non-erosive osteoarthritis.”
But why diabetes would be linked with pain in people with hand osteoarthritis remains to be fully explained.
It could be that if the diabetes was uncontrolled, neuropathy may have been present but the research team did not record data about blood sugar levels.
Another theory is that the systemic inflammation associated with diabetes may localise to the joints.
“The strong association between diabetes and pain in erosive hand osteoarthritis should be further explored,” suggests the team.

Click here to read the original reserach.

Image credit: Hamid Najafi