StemCell Therapy

Running, as a sport or hobby, confers undoubted health benefits.

Runners tend to be less overweight and more fit from a cardiovascular standpoint. Running may also mitigate against depression, diabetes and other ailments.

Researchers, however, are consistently unable to agree whether running is harmful to joints.

A new study, published by investigators from major medical centers across the country, suggests that running does not predispose runners to symptomatic knee degenerative arthritis. The authors also contend that running is not detrimental to the knees.

Previous studies of elite runners have yielded conflicting results.

For example, a propensity to develop more arthritis was observed, but not consistently. The problem is that elite runners tend to be a self-selected cohort. In lay terms, they are the holdouts who escape major joint pain, and therefore keep running.

No one is interested in the ex-runners who quit the sport, due to knee or hip pain. Consequently, researchers sometimes under-estimate the amount of joint damage running causes. Or they might overestimate the damage, by focusing on intense runners with punishing fitness routines.

No one knows, really.

Grace Lo and her collaborators, using data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative public-use data set, attempted to address these concerns, publishing a study of 2,637 recreational runners in Arthritis Care & Research.

Participants were studied retrospectively, or looking back in time. The likelihood of developing knee pain, or symptomatic knee osteoarthritis, appeared to be no higher in runners, compared to non-runners.

Data collected over eight years after enrollment in the Osteoarthritis Initiative seemed to confirm the findings. Physical activity surveys, and X-rays bolstered the conclusions, that Running does not appear to be detrimental from a knee health perspective.

Intriguing as this study is, it still does not completely settle the question of whether recreational running damages knees. That would be too much to ask from a single study.

I note that 2,159 of the original 4,796 persons enrolled in the Osteoarthritis Initiative did not complete the full survey process.

How did those participants fare?

The authors reached overly broad conclusions regarding knee health in runners.

Could some participants have suffered minor structural damage from running that the study was not designed to capture?

Criticisms aside, Lo and colleagues deserve credit for casting their gaze beyond elite runners. Their subjects were an average of 60 years and pursuing running as a top-3 recreational activity.

We need more data on the Average Joe and Average Jane runner. Nearly two-thirds of the self-reported runners in this study, by the way, were men.

Perhaps a prospective study, looking into the future, would be more enlightening.

We could conceivably randomize young adults into groups that run, perform low impact exercise, or are sedentary. Follow-up study with interviews, examinations, and radiographs could be performed one or two decades later.

Who would want to sign up for managing such a long process? Imagine the costs and commitment, for subjects and researchers alike. At the gym, I see athletes in their 20s sprinting on the running machines. Middle-aged persons walk purposefully, on the same devices. The elderly walk even more slowly, or switch to stationary bicycles.

A small amount of knee pain may be physiologically useful. Pain fibers tell us, as we age, how to exercise prudently. We dont want to be tore up from the floor up, as a gentleman once described his health status to me.

A cost-benefit analysis makes sense. It might be worth incurring a bit of arthritis, if our recreational activities ward off heart disease.

Watching television all day is not the answer.

Good luck in finding an exercise program that works for you.

Scott T Anderson, MD, PhD (email [emailprotected]), is Clinical Professor, UC Davis Medical School. This article is informational, and does not constitute, medical advice.

Read the original here:
Verdict still out on whether running contributes to arthritis in the knee - Fairfield Daily Republic

This entry was posted on March 11, 2017 at 10:43 am and is filed under Arthritis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |