TUESDAY, March 28 (HealthDay News) -- Body mass index (BMI) is strongly associated with the risk of later total arthroplasty for primary osteoarthritis of the hip, according to a study published in the March issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism.
Gunnar B. Flugsrud, M.D., of the Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo, Norway, and colleagues matched screening data from almost 1.2 million people with data from the Norwegian Arthroplasty Register. They identified 28,425 total hip replacements as a result of primary osteoarthritis.
There was a dose-response association between BMI and later hip arthroplasty. Men with a BMI of at least 32 were 3.4 times as likely to undergo the procedure as those with a BMI of 20.5-21.9. For women, the corresponding risk was 2.3. When measured before 25 years of age, men had 2.1 times the risk, and women had 1.7 times the risk of arthroplasty with a 5-point increase in BMI. However, by age 55 to 59 years, a 5-point increase in BMI was associated with a 1.5-fold higher arthroplasty risk in men and a 1.1-fold higher risk in women.
"Being overweight entailed the highest relative risk among young participants, and the participants who were overweight at a young age maintained an excess relative risk for arthroplasty throughout the follow-up period," the authors concluded.
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