Study Finds Running Innocent of Causing OA in Knees

Does running bring on osteoarthritis of the knee as runners age? It is easy to assume that is the case as every runner knows a fellow runner who had to quit running because of knee pain. Researchers from hospitals across the U.S. also assumed that “a history of leisure running may increase the risk for knee symptoms and ROA, (radiographic evidence of arthritis).”

But runners take heart—a major study proves this supposition completely wrong.

The study is called the Osteoarthritis Initiative. It was funded by the National Institutes of Health and some pharmaceutical companies. There were 2, 637 participants, 56% of them were female and the average age was 64 years.

Eight years after joining the study the participants completed a questionnaire which revealed that 778 of them—almost 30%—had been runners at some time in their lives. The researchers were surprised to find that, “A history of leisure running is not associated with increased odds of prevalent knee pain. In fact, for knee pain, there was a dose-dependent inverse association with runners.”

Let’s repeat that last point: Researchers found a dose-dependent, inverse association between running and knee pain. Put in plain English, the data from this study indicates that the more you run, the less likely it is that you will have knee pain later in life.

Surprise!

First author Grace Hsaio-Wei Lo, M.D, an assistant professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in an email to Runner’s World editors: “This was true across all age groups and for running at any time in their life.” The subjects who were still running had less knee pain (reported by 21.1%) than did those who had quit running (25.3%). These runners had less pain than those who had never run (29.6%).

The researchers consider signal strength of the study to be the fact that only 2% to 5% of the runners defined themselves as “competitive.” They believe that fact that the study participants were not chosen on the basis of their status as runners made the findings potentially more applicable to a broader population than are many prior studies.

Lo said, “This is the largest study to look at running similar to what the everyday person would do. Also, because it was part of the very large Osteoarthritis Initiative, we used high-quality X-rays and methods of assessing knee symptoms.”