Protect your knee joints by losing that extra fats

Being overweight is not good for health and even for our joints. Yes, a new research suggests losing weight would be good for obese people’s knee joints.

Joints or cartilage can suffer extra pressure if you are overweight or obese, which causes them to wear away.  Well, in addition to this, people who have more body fat, have higher blood levels of substances that trigger inflammation in joints. This raises the risk for osteoarthritis.

“For this research, we analysed the differences between groups with and without weight loss,” said the study’s lead author Alexandra Gersing from the University of California, San Francisco, US. “We looked at the degeneration of all knee joint structures, such as menisci, articular cartilage and bone marrow,” Gersing said. 

For the study, 640 overweight and obese people were chosen who had risk factors for osteoarthritis or had MRI evidence showing mild to moderate osteoarthritis.

For over a period of 48 months the association between weight loss and the progress in cartilage changes on MRI were studied upon.

Three groups of patients were made- those who lost more than 10 per cent of their body weight, those who lost five to 10 per cent of their body weight, and a control group whose weight remained stable. 

It was observed that patients who lost five per cent weight had lower rates of cartilage degeneration when they were compared with stable weight participants.

In case of patients who lost 10 per cent weight, cartilage degeneration slowed down more.