If you’re one of the millions of adults dealing with early or more advanced-stage osteoarthritis in your knee, perhaps you’re pursuing some common treatment options like physical therapy or weight loss to help mitigate symptoms. While those tried and true methods can produce fantastic results, a new study is suggesting that small tweaks to a person’s walking style could also prove instrumental in preventing the eventual need for knee replacement surgery. In today’s blog, we take a closer look at how gait retraining can help slow down the progression of knee osteoarthritis.
Gait Retraining And Knee Health
The goal behind gait retraining is to reduce the stress that the knee is under when walking, running and moving. When a person has an abnormal or unhealthy walking pattern, the knees are oftentimes forced to bear additional stress. By realigning a person’s gait, some of this extra stress on the knees can be alleviated.
“We’ve known that for people with osteoarthritis, higher loads in their knee accelerate progression, and that changing the foot angle can reduce knee load,” said Scott Uhlrich, assistant professor of engineering at Utah’s John and Marcia Price College of Engineering, and co-author of the study. “So the idea of a biomechanical intervention is not new, but there have not been randomized, placebo-controlled studies to show that they’re effective.”
For the study, researchers used a personalized approach to adjust a person’s walking gait after capturing their standard gait with pressure-sensitive treadmills and motion-capture cameras. A group of 68 ideal patients were selected for the study, with half receiving placebo treatment and half being placed in the gait retraining group. Those in the retraining group received six training sessions where they wore biofeedback devices that vibrated when walking to remind users to adjust their gait to an appropriate angle. After one year, all participants self-reported their experience of knee pain and underwent a second MRI to assess their knee damage.
Uhlrich said the team noticed delayed osteoarthritis progression in those in the gait retraining group.
“The reported decrease in pain over the placebo group was somewhere between what you’d expect from an over-the-counter medication, like ibuprofen, and a narcotic, like oxycontin,” said Uhlrich. “With the MRIS, we also saw slower degradation of a marker of cartilage health in the intervention group, which was quite exciting.”
Gait retraining offers a number of unique benefits over other common treatments like medications or physical therapy. It’s incredibly low cost, and you can train your body to walk this way naturally so that you don’t have to consciously seek out treatment. Because of this, it won’t be surprising if gait retraining or an added emphasis on custom orthotics to adjust foot positioning and lower body stress patterns becomes more common as a management option for knee osteoarthritis.
Do what you can to preserve your knee health so that you don’t need to undergo a joint replacement procedure in your 50s or 60s. We can also give you some personalized advice if you’re looking for specific answers to your knee issues. For more information, reach out to Dr. Botero and his team today at (865) 558-4444.
