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Arthritis is the most frequently reported health condition in the working-age population, reported by nearly one quarter of the age 45 to 64 population in the 1978 Social Security Survey of disability and work. An economic model of earnings, which controls for differences in socioeconomic characteristics and other health conditions, indicates that arthritis is responsible for an annual loss of approximately 17 billion in wage earnings in the United States.
Burkhauser et al. (Sat,) studied this question.