Abstract:

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the common form arthritis in the world, and a leading cause of disability. Patients with osteoarthritis suffer from progressive incapacitation in their activities of daily living, and so it deprives communities, both economically and at a personal level.

Objective: To determine the prevalence of Osteoarthritis among patients attending at outpatient clinics at Bugando medical centre in Mwanza Tanzania.

Methods: The retrospective hospital based study were employed and data from medical records at Bugando medical centre and Data was analysed using SPSS version 20, chi-square test was used for continuous variables. The p-value of 0.05 with 95% confidence interval was employed to measure the power of the study.

Results: This study involved 400 patients who attended Orthopedics, Paediatrics and Medical outpatients’ clinics at Bugando medical centre between 30th June 2018-31st July 2019. In this study the prevalence of OA is 24.5% in which majority were women 255 (63.8%) and those aged 50-100 years was 193 (48.3%), majority were coming from Mwanza 143 (35.8%) and more than half of participants were peasants 235 (58.8%) A total of 51 children below age 15 was enrolled from this study and 11 (11.2%) was found to have osteoarthritis. Family history of this disease has shown to have influence because out of 98 (24.5%) nine percent (9%) have positive history of osteoarthritis.

Conclusion: Osteoarthritis is very common among patient attending BMC outpatients’ clinics and most of patients are coming from Mwanza region because of easy accessibility. In our study advanced age and positive family history have shown to associate with occurrence of disease. Public health approaches should be considered in term of primary prevention like community education on weight control and exercise.