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" Osteoarthritis may be a sign of faster &amp;quot;biological ageing&amp;quot; in people, new research has suggested. Researchers at St Thomas&amp;#039; Hospital in London examined 1,100 people, mostly female twins aged between 30 and 79, for the degenerative inflammatory bone disease. As well as taking x-rays of their hands, where the common form of arthritis is often found, researchers also examined the participants&amp;#039; white blood cells to determine the length of their telomeres \u2013 the lengths of DNA which cap chromosomes and which are understood to shorten with biological ageing. The scientists&amp;#039; findings confirmed that the older a person was, the shorter their telomeres were. But researchers also found that telomere lengths were found to be significantly shorter in the 160 people suffering from osteoarthritis in their hands, even after taking into account influential factors such as age, sex, smoking and conditions such as obesity. According to a report on the study, shortly to be published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, all those found with osteoarthritis were aged over 50 and the amount of telomere shortening in sufferers was found to be equivalent to that accrued over 11 years in healthy people. Commenting, one of the study&amp;#039;s leading researchers, Guangju Zhai, told the New Scientist: &amp;quot;It seems that osteoarthritis and the more general degeneration associated with ageing share some common mechanism.&amp;quot;  \u00A9 Adfero Ltd "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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