OBJECTIVE

Osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease are major public health challenges. We aimed to estimate the average sex-specific effects of knee and hip osteoarthritis on the risk of cardiovascular disease.

METHODS

We used 2001-2015 Danish national health registry data to identify all adults with knee or hip osteoarthritis and an age-, sex-, and education-matched group without osteoarthritis. Cardiovascular disease outcomes were identified with relevant ICD-10 codes. The effects of osteoarthritis were estimated with sex-stratified multivariable Cox regression models, accounting for multiple sources of confounding determined a priori with a directed acyclic graph. Results were reported with cumulative incidence curves and hazard ratios (HR) conditioned on age, sex, education, and obesity diagnosis. Sensitivity analyses explored the potential impacts of bias owing to outcome misclassification and unmeasured confounding.

RESULTS

We analysed data from 1,838,434 adults, including 290,781 people with knee or hip osteoarthritis and 1,547,653 age-, sex-, and education-matched controls. Women with knee or hip osteoarthritis had a 44% increased hazard of cardiovascular disease (HR [95% CI] =  1.44 [1.43 to 1.46]), while men with knee or hip osteoarthritis had a 24% increased hazard of subsequent cardiovascular disease (HR[95% CI] =  1.24 [1.23 to 1.26]) compared to people without osteoarthritis. These results were confirmed by sensitivity analyses.

CONCLUSION

The apparent effect of osteoarthritis on cardiovascular disease was stronger in women than in men. Clinicians who care for patients with osteoarthritis should be aware of cardiovascular disease risk when selecting therapies and consider behavioural approaches to improving health-related physical activity behaviour in this population.