Paget’s Disease

Abstract

Paget’s disease is a chronic focal slowly progressive bone disease of unknown aetiology. The first clear description of the disorder was made in 1877 by the London surgeon Sir James Paget (1877), who coined the name “osteitis deformans”, although others had described the condition earlier (Wilks 1860; Czerny 1873). Paget of course described what we would now recognise as very extensive and long-standing disease (Fig. 1); and circumstantial evidence suggests that cases such as his index case with gross bony deformities and skull expansion exhibit the end result of 50 or more years of disease. Since the cause of the disease is still not established, it is possible that some of the clinical variability is due to host response to the aetiological agent(s), and some is due to involvement of more than one (closely related) agent; it is to be hoped that the next few years will, with the application of powerful molecular biology techniques, see the resolution of these issues.