Osteoarthritis in the Middle-Aged and Elderly in China: Prevalence and Influencing Factors

Background: Osteoarthritis is a common joint disease, with the acceleration of the aging process in China, it has troubled the middle-aged and elderly. There have been some epidemiological studies of osteoarthritis conducted in one single site, and most of them were on knee osteoarthritis. The results varied greatly between different surveys. There was still a lack of large-scale and multicenter epidemiological studies of osteoarthritis. This paper aimed to estimate the overall prevalence of lumbar osteoarthritis, cervical osteoarthritis, hand osteoarthritis, knee osteoarthritis, and hip osteoarthritis in the middle-aged and elderly in China by summarizing the existing publications. Methods: We comprehensively searched publications on 1 January 2019 in PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Cochrane Library, CBM, CNNI, VIP, and Wan Fang. Epidemiological publications on osteoarthritis in the middle-aged and elderly Chinese published from 2000 to 2018 were summarized and analyzed by means of systematic review and meta-analysis. Data of prevalence of osteoarthritis in five joints were extracted from the included publications. The Hoy 2012 tool was used to assess the risk of bias of included studies. Results: After performing a systematic search in eight databases and manually searching, 3058 articles were obtained, and 21 articles were included in the meta-analysis. Lumbar osteoarthritis was the most prevalent with a prevalence of 25.03% (95% CI: 0.1444–0.3562). The prevalence of knee osteoarthritis followed, which was 21.51% (95% CI: 0.1873–0.2429). The prevalence of cervical osteoarthritis was 20.46% (95% CI: 0.1244–0.2849). The prevalence of hand osteoarthritis was 8.99% (95% CI: 0.0435–0.1364). The prevalence of hip osteoarthritis was not pooled due to its lack of data. Higher prevalence of knee, hand, lumbar, and cervical osteoarthritis was seen in the female group and southern regions. The prevalence of knee and hand osteoarthritis increased with age. The prevalence of lumbar and cervical osteoarthritis increased with age. There was also a trend that the prevalence increased with age before 70 years old and slightly decreased in the oldest ages. Conclusions: The lumbar joint was the joint most prevalently affected by osteoarthritis, followed by the prevalence of knee, cervical, hand, and hip joint osteoarthritis. Women, the southern population, and the older population are more susceptible to osteoarthritis. The paucity of epidemiology data of osteoarthritis in China appeals for more population-based surveys being conducted in the future. Based on the relatively high prevalence of osteoarthritis obtained from this review, self-management and community-based management should be considered, which can provide experience from the management of hypertensions and diabetes.