Does Running Cause Knee Osteoarthritis?

September 21, 2024

Ever been told that running too much is bad for you and you will likely wear out your knee joints and you will need a replacement? Or have you ever thought to yourself that all that running you did when you were playing sport as a younger person “wore my knees out”?

It certainly has been the story told to many a patient and it’s what I learnt during my Physiotherapy degree many moons ago.

But let’s look at these 2 research papers in recent years trying to answer this question.

Ponzio et al in 2018 – looked at the prevalence of knee arthritis in active marathon runners v the prevalence of knee arthritis in the general population in the United States.

This paper compared the knee arthritis rates of 675 active marathon runners against the knee arthritis rates of the general population from National Centre for Health Statistics in the U.S.A.

It found that the general population had a knee arthritis rate of 17.9%, while the active marathon runners had a knee arthritis rate of ….. 8.8%. Wow that’s 50% less knee arthritis in active marathons runners. Now the average age of both groups was 46 years old but the age ranged from early 20’s through to late 60’s so there was a good spread of ages and the average Km’s run per week, in the marathon group, ranged from as little as 10km through to over 100Km.

Now this is not a “prospective” study, meaning it doesn’t start with 2 groups the same and then look what happens into the future as one group does lots of running and the other doesn’t, so we have to be careful with interpreting the results, but it does prick the interest.

But

We also have this paper:

Timmins et al in 2016 – did a systematic review of the literature with meta-analysis. This is where they search all the scientific literature for one subject, get all the papers together that relate to this subject and try to put all the data together. One of the basic tenets of science – here are my results lets see if other researches get the same result when they do the same research.

They found 15 papers and the results were inconclusive for running causing knee arthritis BUT it suggested that running may have a protective effect AGAINST surgery for knee arthritis. That is, runners had less surgery on their knees than non-runners.

So maybe when we think about all that running we did when we were young and playing sport and how this “wore my knees out”, it might just be that it was the following many, many years of NOT running where the knees developed their arthritis!!!!!!!

Written by: Adam McKee (April 2024)