Eventually, when the cartilage wears down completely, the joint will rub on the bone which is extremely painful.
Shirley, who takes paracetamol for her arthritis, suggested that the only pain she has gone through is from childbirth and that she hasn’t “really had to suffer much pain”.
But this is not the case for a lot of people with arthritis, who are in debilitating pain a lot of the time.
The star also revealed in the Mail Online interview that her “only vice” is smoking ten cigarettes a day–another activity that is bad for arthritis.
A study from 2002 published in Arthritis and Rheumatism found that smoking is likely to lead to genetic events which lead to more severe rheumatoid arthritis.