Arthritis, an inflammation of bone joints, is generally characterized as an illness affecting people over the age of 50, so it can come as a great surprise to parents when their children are diagnosed with some form of it. What may be even more surprising is that roughly 300,000 children in the United States alone have arthritis, and the public is largely unaware of this fact. The most common form of arthritis affecting children is named juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, affecting about 20% of those 300,000 children, and all parents should be educated on this debilitating disease in children. Doctors are not yet entirely sure what causes juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but they believe that it is linked to autoimmune diseases, where white blood cells are unable to differentiate between normal and foreign cells.
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