Abstract
The unstoppable progress in medicine results in a dramatically increasing increase in average life expectancy, but a person does not always live his life in health as defined in 2021 by the so-called Tripartite (World healthy organization - WHO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - FAO UN, World Organisation for Animal Health, until 2003 Office International des Epizooties - OIE) [1,2]. As life expectancy increases, the number of people suffering from chronic diseases increases exponentially.
Chronic diseases associated with old age also include musculoskeletal diseases, and one of the representative diagnoses is osteoporosis and osteoarthritis [2,3,4]. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of osteoporotic patients worldwide increased by 5 million, i.e. to 32 million people who are at risk of an osteoporotic fracture, which is usually the first symptom of this "silent" disease.
In the Czech Republic in 2019, 572 thousand people suffered from osteoporosis, while approximately 80 % of them remain untreated (treatment gap). The number of patients with a low-traumatic fracture increased from 72,195 to 91,349 between 2010 and 2019.
The most prominent subset are vertebral fractures and fractures of proximal femur, which have a 10 to 30 % risk of death within 12 months of their occurrence [2,4]. Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most common joint diseases.
The prevalence is not precisely mapped, according to some world and Czech statistics, 40 % of people over 60 and even 80 % of people over 65 suffer from osteoarthritis [5,6]. The most common localization of OA is the knee joints, hip joints, small joints of the hands and joints on the spine, where not only the articular hyaline cartilage is affected, but also the synovium, joint capsule, tendon and ligament attachments, muscle attachments and subchondral bone.
In younger people, it is mostly a posttraumatic condition, in older people the influence of genetic, biomechanical, endocrinological, inflammatory agents and factors associated with cartilage aging is assumed [5,6,7]. Especially in the last decade, there is growing evidence linking both of these diseases to cell senescence [7,8].