Dept. of Biology, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Mich. 48859. Examination of mammalian skeletons provided evidence that arthritis is widespread among a variety of medium and large-sized mammals, both captive and noncaptive.
Arthritis tends to appear after epiphyseal plates are ossified.
Animals of different life styles and diets are afflicted. No reports of arthritis in small wild rodents or bats were found. There are numerous reports, especially in the veterinary literature, of arthritis in domestic animals. Our findings are summarized below and include only mature animals with ossified epiphyseal plates, unless otherwise stated. All animals examined with unossified epiphyseal plates were free of arthritis except for slight degenerative changes in one large bear which still retained a few bones with incompletely fused epiphyses.