Dietary and caloric restriction and age‐related spinal osteoarthritis: a longitudinal study of primates (1025.7)

Abstract

Dietary and/or caloric restriction have been shown to decrease the rate of senescence and increase maximum life span in several species, but how it impacts age‐related degenerative processes, such as osteoarthritis, is unclear. Like humans, Rhesus macaques develop spontaneous osteoarthritis with age and have been studied under dietary/caloric restriction protocols for almost two decades. We hypothesized that restricted macaques would develop less spinal osteoarthritis with age than monkeys fed a normal diet.We assessed osteoarthritis in the thoracolumbar spine of macaques from dietary/caloric restriction studies at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the National Institute on Aging. We assessed osteophytosis (OST) and disc space narrowing (DSN) from annual radiographs of 68 macaques from the WNPRC (males, n=41 (20 restricted); females, n=27 (13 restricted)) and 104 macaques from NIA (males, n=52 (26 restricted); females, n=52 (22 restricted)) studies. A positive association between age and both OST (p<0.001) and DSN (p<0.001) was found in macaques from both sites, but no difference was found between normally fed and restricted animals (WNPRC: OST p=0.222, DSN p=0.574; NIA: OST p=0.238, DSN p=0.386) when adjusted for sex and body mass.Dietary/caloric restriction does not affect spinal osteoarthritis, which perhaps implicates loading as a contributor to the etiology of osteoarthritis.