StemCell Therapy

You may have heard about arthritis (say: ar-thry-tis), which is a disease that causes swelling and pain in a person's joints.

But isn't it something that only old people get?

Actually, kids can get a kind of arthritis called juvenile idiopathic arthritis or JIA (it's also called juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, or JRA). Juvenile means young, so this means that JIA is different from the arthritis that adults get. Kids can have many different types of arthritis, but this is the most common.

Joints are the places where bones meet. Arthritis can prevent people from moving their joints properly. JIA affects kids under age 16, who have arthritis in one or more joints.

Many problems can cause pain and swelling of the joints, so a doctor will want to know how long these problems have been going on. To be considered JIA, a kid must have swelling and pain for at least 6 weeks.

Seven types of juvenile idiopathic arthritis can affect kids:

No one really knows what causes JIA. Something in the environment such as a virus may trigger the disease in kids that already have certain genes that make it more likely for them to get it. JIA is not contagious, so you can't catch it from someone else.

Arthritis is an autoimmune (say: aw-toe-i-myoon) disease. Normally, a kid's immune system sends out white blood cells to protect the body and fight outside invaders like bacteria and viruses that can make a kid sick. With JIA, the immune system makes a mistake and targets healthy cells as if they were harmful.

Instead of recognizing the healthy cells and saying, "Hi, nice to see you," the immune system thinks the healthy cells need to be destroyed and releases chemicals to fight the healthy cells. The chemicals the immune system releases cause the pain and swelling that a kid with arthritis experiences.

Continued here:
Arthritis - KidsHealth

This entry was posted on July 9, 2015 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Arthritis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |