Does Running Really Cause Arthritis?

By: Carly Tyler

Does running cause Arthritis ?  Why wouldn’t it?  Arthritis is painful inflammation and stiffness of the joints..When you run you put all your pressure on your knees, and muscles. It would be easy to believe that running would be bad on your knees. Continuous running is an obvious culprit for causing arthritis to the joints of the legs. You are applying big loads of pressure to your knees which would  eventually degrade its protective cartilage, which would lead to arthritis.

Many studies have showed that if the runner starts off with good knees the risk of arthritis does not increase due to running. Some research has had some people wondering why running can combine high impacts with a low risk for arthritis. So for a new study helpfully entitled, “Why Don’t Most Runners Get Knee Osteoarthritis?” researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and other institutions looked more closely at what happens, biomechanically, when we run and how those actions compare with walking. Walking is usually considered a low-impact activity. So many doctors highly recommend elderly people to walk more.

During the study called, “Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise” the researchers recruited 14 healthy adult recreational runners, half of them women, with no history of knee problems. They had half of these runners walk, and half run.  At the end of this study the researches came to a conclusion that the amount of force moving through the volunteer’s knee over the distances were similar whether they walked or ran. The half that ran generated more  pounding while they took each stride, but they took fewer strides than the half that walked. So over the course, say, a mile or the overall loads on the knees were about the same on each person.

Dr. Ross Miller from the University of Maryland who led the previous study that was stated in the article called, “Why Runners Don’t Get Arthritis” said, runners frequently succumb to knee injuries unrelated to arthritis.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/why-runners-dont-get-knee-arthritis/?_r=0

http://www.runnersworld.com/health/does-running-cause-arthritis