Survey on healthy lifestyles and osteoarthritis-related mortality

A healthy lifestyle is thought to reduce mortality in the general population, but it is unclear whether the same is true in osteoarthritis. Fan and colleagues present new data on the topic at the 2023 annual congress of EULAR – the European Alliance of Rheumatology Associations.

In this work, data from the UK Biobank were used to investigate the association of individual and combined healthy lifestyle factors with the risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality among 104,142 people with osteoarthritis.

The researchers gave each person a rating for their lifestyle, based on their body mass index (BMI) and self-reported diet, sleep duration, physical activitysedentary time, social connections, smoking and alcohol consumption – all factors considered to be associated with health.

A total of 9,915 deaths were recorded after the first two years of follow-up. The models showed various associations between people’s lifestyle and mortality. Sleep duration had a U-shaped relationship, while moderate physical activity was L-shaped, and BMI and vigorous activity were J-shaped – a trend that begins with a sharp decline and is followed by a dramatic increase.

For sleep, the ideal seems to be 7 hours per night, while the threshold for moderate physical activity was 550 minutes per week, and 240 minutes per week for vigorous physical activity. The J-shaped turning point for BMI was 28 kg/m².

In multivariate models, each lifestyle factor was significantly associated with all-cause mortality, as well as mortality associated with cancer and cardiovascular, digestive, and respiratory diseases.

This study could be important in helping identify a healthy lifestyle that could significantly reduce the risk of mortality in people with osteoarthritis. Indeed, EULAR recently published recommendations on lifestyle behaviors and work participation to prevent the progression of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases, including osteoarthritis.

The general principles define the importance of a healthy lifestyle, how lifestyle modifications should be implemented and their role in relation to medical treatments.1 It now appears that this could potentially benefit both mortality and disease progression.