The knee joint is a common site of osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that affects more than a third of adults over the age of 60, and obesity can worsen it.

‘Fat people who lose a substantial amount of body weight can significantly slow down the degeneration of their knee cartilage.’

Obesity is a major risk factor for osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that affects more than a third of adults over the age of 60, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The knee joint is a common site of osteoarthritis, and in many people the condition progresses until total knee replacement becomes necessary. 




"Once cartilage is lost in osteoarthritis, the disease cannot be reversed," said the study’s lead author, Alexandra Gersing, M.D., from the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco.
Since cartilage loss cannot be reversed, it is important for people at risk of osteoarthritis or with early signs of the disease to slow the degeneration of cartilage. Weight loss has been shown to slow down cartilage degeneration in overweight and obese individuals, but it was unclear if the method used to lose weight made a difference.
Dr. Gersing and colleagues investigated cartilage degeneration and joint abnormalities over the course of 96 months in overweight and obese individuals who maintained stable weight and who lost weight via differing regimens.
The researchers studied 760 men and women with a body mass index of greater than 25 from the Osteoarthritis Initiative, a nationwide research study focused on the prevention and treatment of knee osteoarthritis. The patients either had mild to moderate osteoarthritis or risk factors for the disease. Patients were divided into a group of 380 patients who lost weight, and a control group of 380 patients who lost no weight. The weight-loss group was further segmented by weight loss method: diet and exercise, diet alone and exercise alone. The researchers used MRI to quantify knee osteoarthritis at the beginning of the study, at 48 months and at 96 months.
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"These results add to the hypothesis that solely exercise as a regimen in order to lose weight in overweight and obese adults may not be as beneficial to the knee joint as weight loss regimens involving diet," Dr. Gersing said.