The association between preexisting conditions and osteoarthritis development in peripheral joints: A population based nested case-control study

AIM: To study the risk of receiving a new (incident) osteoarthritis (OA) diagnosis in different joint sites based on conditions diagnosed in the 20 years prior the OA diagnosis. METHODS: We used register data for the entire population of the Skåne region (Sweden) to perform a nested case-control study. The outcome was newly diagnosed (incident) OA in peripheral joints, i.e. knee (ICD-10 code M17), hip (M16) and other joints (M15, M18, M19), diagnosed in 2018 or 2019 in persons aged 45+ years with 20 years of register coverage. For each OA case, we sampled 1 control matched on age (1-year strata), sex and residential area in the year of index date using incidence density sampling. The exposures of interest comprised 50 comorbidities. We used adjusted conditional logistic regression for analysis. RESULTS: Between January 1st(,) 2018 and December 31st(,) 2019, we identified 7 201, 2 895, and 7863 persons, respectively, with newly diagnosed knee, hip and other OA. Hypertension, back pain, gout, allergy, depression, anxiety and migraine were all associated with increased risk of knee OA diagnosis, while only gastroesophageal reflux disease and back pain were associated with newly diagnosed hip OA. Interestingly, many of the analysed conditions were associated with increased risk of OA diagnosis in other peripheral joints, including diagnosed generalised OA. CONCLUSIONS: The risk of being diagnosed with OA increases with the presence of multimorbidity earlier in life, but the associations seem to differ between weight-bearing and non-weight-bearing joints.