Israeli study finds why humans suffer from joint pain while other great apes stay agile

If you suffer from a chronic joint disease such as osteoarthritis, you may be overweight and put a burden on your knees. But you can also blame evolution and envy chimpanzees and gorillas, which are almost always exempt from this painful and debilitating condition.Associate Prof. David Gokhman of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot has just conducted a study of the problem in collaboration with the lab of Dr. Fumitaka Inoue of Kyoto University in Japan.He and his team, led by doctoral students Nadav Mishol from Gokhman’s lab and Yizhi Yan from Inoue’s lab, have just published their findings in the prestigious journal Nature, titled “The gene-regulatory evolution of the human skeleton.”“That shift made our joints less effective at absorbing shocks and exposed us to skeletal diseases – including osteoarthritis, degeneration of the spinal discs, and herniated discs – that are uncommon in other great apes, including those that reach old age.“Even chimps that live into their 60s or 70s, for example, are almost as agile as younger ones while climbing trees,” Gokhman, a molecular geneticist, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview.At first glance, “We seem to have struck a poor evolutionary bargain.