Accelerated Aging and Arthritis
From ScienceDaily: "The observation that people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) die at a younger age than people without this disease is not new, but arthritis experts don't fully understand the causes of the increased mortality rates. ... RA and other diseases can cause multiple systems within the body to age more rapidly than expected. Cells affected by diseases begin to show signs of what's called accelerated aging - damage at the molecular level resulting in poorer function. ... As expected, the observed survival rate for people with RA was consistently less than the expected survival rates for people in the general population. Researchers estimated that the RA patients in the study group aged at approximately 1.25 times the rate of people in the general population. Another way to express this finding is that during each 10-year time span, people with RA, in effect, age 12.5." An obvious place to look would be the long-term effects of chronic inflammation on the body.
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113170808.htm