Arthritis Can Pose Severe Limitations on Work Ability

If you feel pain and stiffness in your body or have trouble moving around, you might have arthritis. Most kinds of arthritis cause pain and swelling in your joints. Joints are places where two bones meet, such as your elbow or knee. Over time, a swollen joint can become severely damaged. Some kinds of arthritis can also cause problems in your organs, such as your eyes or skin.

One type of arthritis, osteoarthritis, is often related to aging or to an injury. Other types occur when your immune system, which normally protects your body from infection, attacks your body's own tissues. Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common form of this kind of arthritis. Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is a form of the disease that happens in children.

Arthritis can make it difficult to perform activities of daily living. One's ability to work may also be severely limited.

Addressing work limitation due to arthritis through greater use of effective and available interventions should help reduce the high impact that arthritis can have on work in all U.S. states. Additionally, effective interventions will also decrease the personal, societal, and financial impacts of arthritis.

In all states, US working–age adults face work limitations that they attribute to arthritis. The prevalence of work limitations was as high as 50% in some states. In all states, people with work limitations due to arthritis were less likely to be employed than both those who had arthritis without work limitations and all working–age adults in the state.

These are the first state–specific prevalence estimates of the impact of work limitations due to arthritis. Examining this impact is important as arthritis is projected to increase with the aging of the population, and Americans are staying in the workforce longer. Anticipating and accommodating persons with work limitations due to arthritis makes simple social and economic sense. The increased use of effective interventions among those with arthritis can help people with arthritis enter and stay in the workforce and should be a national priority.

Sources

Morbidity and Mortality Report, CDC, Oct 11, 2007
http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/mmwrnews/2007/n071011.htm

National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/arthritis.html