Wellness Wednesday

The Importance of Dieting for Knee Pain
While exercise is very important for controlling knee pain, losing weight may be more of a long-term answer for people who are overweight.

Weight loss is a very popular topic on this blog, and it should be due to the various other physical complications that it can cause. One of those complications excess weight may cause is severe joint pain. The number of Americans with severe joint pain in 2002 came in at 10.5 million and then jumped to 14.6 million in 2014. This climb in severe joint pain is in part due to the rise in obesity, which carries osteoarthritis as a major risk factor. One of the major sites affected by osteoarthritis  is the knee, and many who are affected by the disease often undergo total knee replacements to replace the cartilage that they have lost. With obesity as a key risk factor in mind, researchers put together a study in order to monitor how much weight affects cartilage loss and joint pain in affected patients. 

The Radiological Society of  North America 760 men and women with a BMI greater than 25 (BMI over 25 indicates being overweight and over 30 is obese) from the Osteoarthritis Initiative. The group was divided into 380 people who had lost weight and 380 who had not lost weight. The weight-loss groups were then segmented into losing weight by diet and exercise, diet alone and exercise alone. The participants were also MRI'd at the beginning of the study, at 48 months, and then 96 months. Cartilage loss was significantly less in the participants who lost weight compared to those who did not, but only in the segments of dieting alone and exercising and dieting. Weight loss for those who only exercised saw no change in cartilage degeneration. 

TL;DR: Exercise alone does not help slow cartilage degeneration, diet is necessary as well.