WASHINGTON — Losing weight can help protect your knees from osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that afflicts more than one in three people over 60 years old in the U.S.
A study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) followed 506 overweight and obese people with knee osteoarthritis. Some did not diet, some lost a little and some lost 10 percent or more of their body weight.
This study used MRI scans to evaluate knee cartilage so closely it could detect changes in cartilage quality even before the cartilage started to break down.
“Cartilage degenerated a lot slower in the group that lost more than 10 percent of their body weight, especially in the weight-bearing regions of the knee,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Alexandra Gersing, of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a news release.
“However, those with 5 to 10 percent weight loss had almost no difference in cartilage degeneration compared to those who didn’t lose weight.”
Losing weight not only helps protect the knee cartridge of overweight people, study authors say it also reduces the risk they’ll develop osteoarthritis.
