6 Skeletons Seem to Answer Riddle of Origins of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Six prehistoric skeletons found along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama apparently answer a decades-old riddle of where rheumatoid arthritis originated.

It was in the New World, scientists say.

For nearly 75 years, medical researchers have been trying to determine the source of rheumatoid arthritis--a painful connective tissue disease that results when the body rejects its own cells.

The potentially crippling disease was not documented in Europe until 1800, leading some scientists to speculate that the disorder may have somehow been a byproduct of the Industrial Age.

Examinations of pre-19th-Century Old World skeletons have turned up no definite cases of rheumatoid arthritis, although other joint diseases have been found.

Longtime Search

“One thing people have been searching for, both in the Old World and New World, in prehistoric material is evidence of rheumatoid arthritis. Some people have suggested examples, but in every case the examples are such that they could also be representative of other arthritic diseases,” said Kenneth Turner, director of the University of Alabama’s human osteology laboratory in Tuscaloosa.

“Now we have found six good examples, perhaps as old as 5,000 years, from northern Alabama--a striking discovery that shows rheumatoid arthritis apparently began in the New World,” said Turner, co-author of a study published recently in the journal Science.

The ancient signs of rheumatoid arthritis were discovered during an examination of skeletons of 84 adults who lived 3,000 to 5,000 years ago near what is now Florence, Ala.

Anthropologists were initially checking the skeletons, excavated about 30 years ago, for signs of syphilis--another disease that may have originated in the Americas, Turner said.

But when a graduate student described puzzling erosion patterns on some skeletons, Dr. Bruce Rothschild of the Arthritis Center of Northeastern Ohio in Youngstown suspected they were caused by rheumatoid arthritis.

Closer examination and X-ray studies showed six skeletons had bone erosion patterns typica l of rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, four of the six cases were female--following the disease’s modern-day tendency to strike more women than men.

In the skeletons, as in arthritis patients today, the joints most often affected were fingers, toes and other extremities, while the spine and pelvic area were spared, the researchers found.

“These six Late Archaic individuals are the earliest known sufferers of a disease indistinguishable from rheumatoid arthritis,” the researchers concluded.

That means rheumatoid arthritis was probably exported to the Old World some time between 1500 and 1800, but the exact mode of transmission is unknown.

Turner suspects the disease traveled by an infectious, rather than genetic, route. Researchers are now looking at early items of trans-Atlantic trade, including tobacco, deer and rodents, as possible carriers of a micro-organism or allergen responsible for rheumatoid arthritis.