A report recently published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 300,000 children in the U.S. suffer from some form of arthritis. As our friend, Timothy Spaulding, a Top Health Blogger for the Arthritis Community on Wellsphere and author of the Current Arthritis News and Research Blog explains, some 50,000 to 100,000 of that estimate suffer from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that can lead to permanent joint damage.

According to his article, this report says that 1 in 250 children under the age of 18 have been diagnosed with arthritis of another rheumatologic condition.

The study was lead by Dr. Jeffrey Sacks, an epidemiologist with the CDRC. His team studied information from doctor’s offices and emergency rooms across the U.S. One of the findings was that arthritis in children led to 744,000 doctor visits and 83,000 emergency room visits annually.

This is the first comprehensive national estimate of kids with arthritis and it includes a state-by-state estimate of kids diagnosed with arthritis or other rheumatologic conditions.

Here are some key points to the findings:

· The incidence ranges from a low of 500 kids in Wyoming to a high of 38,000 in California.

· Many of these children must travel long distances to receive specialized care. 15,000 children with arthritis are residents of 11 states which have no pediatric rheumatologist and on average they travel 57 miles to see a specialist.

· Those states are Alaska, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Some doctors worry that due to the lack of availability of pediatric rheumatologists many children with inflammatory forms of arthritis are not diagnosed early enough to prevent disability. They say kids might bounce from one doctor to another before someone familiar with the disease makes an accurate diagnosis. In addition, Pediatricians and emergency room doctors might miss the signs of the more serious forms of arthritis and could send kids home without the proper treatment.

According to Spaulding, a provision of the proposed Arthritis Prevention, Control and Cure Act introduced in 2004 called for a better determination of the size of the childhood arthritis problem. Passage of the Arthritis Prevention, Control and Cure Act is necessary as it would encourage more physicians to enter the field and also would highlight the research needs for children with arthritis.

For more articles like this one, check out Timothy Spaulding’s Current Arthritis News and Research Blog.