Adults who gain a lot of weight are at an increased risk of having a repair surgery for their arthritic knees. Researchers from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health found that people who are slim at the age of 20 years but are overweight for most of the next 30 years are three times more likely to need a knee surgery than those who stayed at a normal weight. People who gained weight by 30 years of age and did not lose it were also posed to a three times risk of developing knee problems. However, people who gained weight by the age of 20 were twice as likely to require knee surgery as compared to normal weight people. The findings suggest that being constantly overweight carries lesser risk of having knee problems than adding a lot of pounds in adulthood. To protect people from knee problems, weight control during early adulthood should be encouraged. A propensity to knee arthritis is often inherited, but other risk factors for the condition include age, sex, previous injury and obesity. To investigate whether it's worse to be overweight for all or only some of adulthood, researchers interviewed 220 men and women between the ages of 55 and 75 years, who had undergone surgery to treat knee arthritis. They asked them what they weighed at age 20, 30, 40 and 50, and compared their responses to those of 415 similarly aged people who did not need knee surgery. People who started gaining weight after the age of 20 and were overweight during at least one other period in adulthood were significantly more likely to have undergone knee surgery as compared to those who were never overweight in childhood. Shifts from normal to overweight between the ages from 20 and 50 years were more closely associated with the risk of knee arthroplasty (i.e., joint repair surgery) than constant overweight. The findings suggest that gaining weight may be harder on knees if the joints have problems adapting to the excess weight, or if a metabolic factor is at work.
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases,
November 2004