Does Running increase the incident of knee and hip osteoarthritis

[Corney]

here are 3 interesting articles concerning running and the incident of OA:

Effects of running and walking on osteoarthritis of the hip.

Running with Knee osteoarthritis.

Does long distance running cause osteoarthritis?

There are many other variables other than running that can cause Osteoarthritis of the knee and hips.  Overweight, previous athletic injuries, poor bio-mechanics especially of the foot and ankle when the foot hits the ground.  Tomorrow I will list a variety of problems that affect the foot, ankle, lower leg and hip.  This is not intended to scare you, convince you to stop walking 50-80K steps a day, but merely to inform you.  In my 38 years as  Physical Therapist I have never treated a runner with OA or who needed a total Hip or Knee

Etiology of OA is unknown.  Oa appears to be a result of a complex system of interacting mechanical, biological, biochemical, and enzymatic feedback loops when one or more fails.  Factors to consider are congenital joint abnormalities, genetic defects, infections, metabolic, endocrine and neuropathic diseases, acute or chronic trauma( including fractures) to the hyaline cartilage or tissue surrounding it( prolonged overuse of a joint or group of joints as in certain occupations like foundry work.  Peculiarly, long distance running chaampions have no increase in OA compared with age and sex matched groups.  From the Merck Manual.+

[Baltoscott]

-Effects of running and walking on osteoarthritis of the hip.

-Running with Knee osteoarthritis.

-Does long distance running cause osteoarthritis?

@Corney -- did you mean to include links for these in your post?  

[Corney]

Yes

[Dominique]

To include links in your message, use the link icon!

[WavyDavey]

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@Baltoscott wrote:

-Effects of running and walking on osteoarthritis of the hip.

-Running with Knee osteoarthritis.

-Does long distance running cause osteoarthritis?

@Corney -- did you mean to include links for these in your post?  

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No links, but I guess the citation is at the end Merck Manual.

I did some searching, and of course most of the articles were very anecdotal, and on runner's web sites. There was this study, that seems to indicate what @Corney is saying.

Outside of OA, it does seem like quite a few longtime runners I know have come onto joint issues. None of them regretted running though. 🙂

[BruceBu]

@WavyDavey - nice concise paper, thanks! Here is the important part:

"Results

Most subjects showed little initial radiographic OA (6.7% of runners and 0 controls); however, by the end of the study runners did not have more prevalent OA (20 vs 32%, p =0.25) nor more cases of severe OA (2.2% vs 9.4%, p=0.21) than did controls. Regression models found higher initial BMI, initial radiographic damage, and greater time from initial radiograph to be associated with worse radiographic OA at the final assessment; no significant associations were seen with gender, education, previous knee injury, or mean exercise time.

Conclusions

Long-distance running among healthy older individuals was not associated with accelerated radiographic OA. These data raise the possibility that severe OA may not be more common among runners."

Long distance running seems to be preventative, not causative, of OA for healthy individuals. This is consistent with a much larger statistical study of nearly 90,000 runners and walkers (read it here), which found that both OA and hip replacement incidence is reduced by 15-20% in both runners and walkers who do more that 1.8 MET-hr/day (metabolic equivalent hours per day - about 40 minutes of walking at 3 mph or 10 minutes of running at 6 mph), and that these reductions remain at higher exercise levels, up to people training for and running 5 or more marathons a year.