A new discovery from the Bone and Joint Institute at Western University is helping unlock the mystery surrounding a common spinal disease.
Jim Stevely has been living with chronic joint and muscle pains for years, “My fingers...my elbows...knees, ankles...hips...they all hurt.”
Stevely has a disease called DISH, or diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, which occurs when ligaments and connective tissue hardens along the spine.
“It’s hard some days to get through the day and you really have to learn how to pace, that’s a big thing to learn.”
But he's is not alone, in fact DISH is a very common spine disease
“It affects 25 per cent of males over 50 and it’s a disease that’s poorly understood so no one knows where it starts or why it starts,” says Dr. Cheryl Séguin from the Bone and Joint Institute.
Séguin and her research team have been studying DISH, because currently there are no treatments available for patients suffering from this disease.
“We’ve taken a different approach by coming at if from different angles using human tissue, using mouse models to ask different questions to try to better understand the disease as a whole and figure out if there are any ways we can intervene.”
Working collaboratively with surgeons, radiologists and physiotherapists from the Bone and Joint institute, the team was able to get a better understanding of this condition.
“We were able to find that the tissues don’t always look like it’s new bone that’s formed on the spine, instead we have found little pockets of dense materials that are calcifications,” Séguin explains.
The hope moving forward is to determine how DISH actually begins and to eventually find targeted treatments for patients suffering from this condition.
