Prevalence and etiology of symptomatic elbow osteoarthritis.

A total of 1150 consecutive patients attending fracture clinics were examined. One hundred fifty patients were excluded because they had fractures close to the elbow, multiple joint osteoarthritis, or posttraumatic osteoarthritis. This exclusion left a study population of 1000 patients. The prevalence of symptomatic elbow osteoarthritis was 2%. Osteoarthritis was found to be more common in men (p < 0.001) and in workers who did heavy manual labor (p < 0.016).