[Research on osteoarthritis in Latin America]

To evaluate the investigative approach towards osteoarthritis of latinamerican physicians, we reviewed the literature. After a manual and electronic search of Latin american medical publications (1980 to 1990) and of 9 Mexican medical journals (1976 to 1990), we reviewed all papers about osteoarthritis. We found 60 such papers (40 from Mexico and 20 from 7 other countries) and analyzed their goals and methods. The common subject was "treatment with nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs" (52%), followed by "quality of attention" (25%); "other treatments" (12%) and "epidemiology" (10%). The most common methodologic design was "series of cases" (28%), followed by "editorials" (17%); "controlled clinical trials" (17%), "interview collected data" (17%), "monographies" (10%) and "comparative cohorts" (8%). An innovative and positive aspect is the presence of 25% of studies on "quality of life", "cost-benefits" and "quality of attention". Most studies used insufficiently valid designs and we did not find studies designed to establish causality or to look for the validation of diagnostic tests or prognostic factors, which we propose as methods and fields to study from now on.