What Is Arthritis and How Does It Affect the Body?

When most people think about arthritis, they largely associate it with the elderly. There is some factual basis to this assumption, as the disease is by far most common among senior citizens. However, it can actually affect people of all ages, including very young children. It is also common for people to think of arthritis as a single disease, but it actually encompasses more than 100 different diseases, many of which are quite different.

While there are over a hundred types of arthritis and some of them affect the body in vary different ways, there are also a number of symptoms that are common across the different kinds of arthritis. The disease typically affects the various joints in the body, commonly causing inflammation, swelling, and general stiffness in the affected joints. Among senior citizens, osteoarthritis is the most common type of arthritis, often affecting the knees.

In addition to symptoms that affect mobility and the joints, causing general movement issues, there are also a number of other symptoms. This includes fever, extreme tiredness, hunger, weight loss, dry eyes, and Crepitus. Crepitus, is a condition where simple movements result in a crackling or popping sound coming from the joints. This is one reason that people often associated cracking ones fingers with arthritis, as they do share similarities, although in the case of cracking fingers, it is not a direct cause of arthritis.

It is most common for arthritis to affect joints, but certain types of arthritis can also affect the joints and cause skin issues, like rashes or scaly lesions on the body. It is also often related to chronic pain, with people experiencing pain in a number of parts of their body.

While osteoarthritis is the most common type of elderly arthritis, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis is more common among children. In fact, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis affects over 300 thousand children a year. While Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis shares the same name as Rheumatoid Arthritis, it is actually quite different among children. To help clear up this confusion, it is often also referred to as Juvenile Chronic Arthritis or Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.

A Quick Look at Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis

There are actually 3 different sub-categories of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, including Pauciarticular, Polyarticular, and Systemic arthritis.

These, again, will share some similarities with each other, but the main difference is that in Pauciarticular, at most four joints are affected by the disease. However, in Polyarticular five or more joints are affected and in Systemic arthritis, rashes and damage to organs develops. Systemic arthritis is most common among younger children between the age of one and six, while Polyarticular is the most common type of juvenile arthritis. While Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis is the most common type of arthritis to affect children, it is not the only type of juvenile arthritis.