Want to Avoid Osteoarthritis?  Drop the Excess Weight!  

New Study Shows Rapid Knee Cartilage Degeneration in Overweight People

What most in the medical profession have known for some time has finally been validated in a new study in the journal Radiology: that being overweight can and does lead to early cartilage destruction in the knees.  

Last year one of the physicians I worked with told me that his own knee pain (which had been through a surgery previously) dropped over 50% after he lost just 13 pounds…and he wasn’t what you’d think of as “heavy”.   Nonetheless, even he was shocked.  

A report in January showed that an average weight loss of only 11 pounds amongst arthritis sufferers cut their pain by 50% as well.

Osteoarthritis typically progresses rather slowly, though it can affect others at a more rapid pace. This is the first study (published in the August issue of Radiology) to connect being overweight with rapid progression of arthritis and cartilage loss.  

The researchers enrolled 336 overweight patients from an existing study on osteoarthritis. All were at risk of osteoarthritis, but had minimal or no loss of cartilage in their knees at the time.  

Thirty months later at follow-up to enrollment, just over 20% of the subjects demonstrated a slow loss of knee cartilage while almost 6% had rapid cartilage loss, according to the results of the study. 

The main risk factors for cartilage loss were: 

·          pre-existing articular cartilage (first type of cartilage) damage  

·          being overweight or obese,  

·          meniscus (the second type of cartilage of the knee) tears, and  

·          severe lesions seen on an MRI.  

Other factors include inflammation of the membrane lining the joints (synovitis) and abnormal build-up of fluid in the joint, according to the report. 

Being overweight was associated with rapid cartilage loss according to the researchers’ conclusions.   According to the statistics, for every one-unit increase in body mass index, the chances of rapid cartilage loss increased 11 percent.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re a man, woman, young or old, nor does it matter of your ethnicity. 

Currently, once degenerative arthritis strikes, the only treatments are therapy, injections, pain management and joint replacement.  

Though some nutritional supplements have shown efficacy in delaying deterioration, researchers point out that the best treatment is prevention: keep the weight off. 

People with arthritis typically don’t know that they have it until their knee hurts and it swells considerably, which usually happens after one event such as a long day on one’s feet.   What seems like a benign activity can actually set off the cascade of arthritis.   

By then your only hope is weight and pain management, lifestyle modifications, and then if nothing helps…surgery. 

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  

How many ounces do YOU need to lose?