A new study published in Arthritis Care and Research show that sleep disturbance increases depression and disability among osteoarthritis (OA) patients, but doesn't worsen pain.

Researchers explained that arthritis is one of the top three health disability in the U.S., with 30 million Americans affected by it.

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This causes an increase of health care costs by USD$186 billion from 1996 to 2005, they added.

Researchers said that previous study showed that 31 percent of people that have knee OA have problems initiating sleep.

Eighty-one percent of these patients have difficulty maintaining sleep at night, and 77 percent of them were just bothered with general sleeping problems.

Patricia Parmelee from University of Alabama said that to know more about this they investigated the relationship of sleep with OA-related pain, disability and depressed mood in a single study.

Researchers then asked information on sleep disturbance, pain, functional limitations and depressive symptoms of 288 knee OA patients.

After that, they used sleep disturbance to predict changes in pain, disability and depression over a year

Through their findings, they found that sleep can be independently associated with pain and depression.

It also confirms that sleep disturbances increase depression and disability but doesn't worsen the pain patients felt.

Parmelee believes that their study proves that depression has a strong connection to sleep and pain, especially with people who continuously experience severe pain.

She also said that further investigation of the effects of sleep in disability progression can help new interventions that can help OA patients.