You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Osteoarthritis as a complication of artificial environment: the Cavia (guinea pig) story
  1. B M Rothschild
  1. Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, Youngstown, OH 44512; Department of Medicine, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, Rootstown, OH 44272; Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44242; The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; and University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, Lawrence, KS 66045
  1. Correspondence to:
    Professor B M Rothschild, Arthritis Center of Northeast Ohio, 5701 Market Street, Ohio 44512, USA

https://doi.org/10.1136/ard.62.10.1022

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Osteoarthritis (OA) has been variously described as a phenomenon of aging or a mechanically derived process,1–3 perhaps a simplification. Animals caught in the wild seldom (about 1%) have any evidence of OA, in contrast with captured animals (be they colony or cage raised).4–6 Removal of an animal from its natural habitat is associated with a 10-fold increase in the prevalence of OA, whether the animals were zoo or colony raised.4–6 This is clearly not a simple issue of lifespan, as the distribution of affected joints (for example, knee, shoulder), is different in wild-caught and captive samples.4–6

    It has been suggested that Cavia, the guinea pig, is a possible exception.7–9 Analysis in those studies was based on captive guinea pigs. The …

    View Full Text