Scientists of University of Utah School of Medicine, US, have found that excess body weight can put extra strain on the weight bearing cartilage of the joints leading to damages to the knee.
The research, which is slated to come out in the current issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine, says that obese people have a higher possibility of tearing their ligament called meniscus, which bears most of the load in the knee joint. As the body mass index increases the chances of a knee damage also rises. The overweight people with a BMI of more than 25 are three tiomes more likely to have a knee ligament tear than people with normal BMI (20 or more), while those who are overweight, with BMI more than 30 have a 15 to 25 times more chance of causing a damage to their knees.Of the 850,000 knee ligament tear operations performed in US annually, 450,000 operations are done on overweight or obese people alone. Between obese men and women, obese women have a more chance of ligament of the knee being damaged and hence need to be more careful.
