A new study finds that although running pummels knees more than walking, it may strengthen and build up cartilage, helping fight off knee arthritis, The New York Times reported.
Knee arthritis develops for some runners but not all. As a group, avid runners may be “statistically less likely” to become arthritic than nonrunners, The Times said.
But the question of why running impacts so many runners’ knees still linger. The topic has been a research focus for Ross Miller, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
Miller and his colleagues’ earlier research investigated if running mechanics make a difference. They asked volunteers to run and walk along a track aligned with plates to calculate the forces generated with each step, The Times said.
The findings showed that people hit the ground harder while running, “clobbering their knees far more with each stride.” The data also showed that they took fewer strides while “covering the same distance as when walking.”
Thus, collective forces moving through their knees overtime should be roughly the same, the researchers determined, no matter if a person walked or ran.
Recently, however, Miller started doubting if this discovery truly explained why running wasn’t damaging more knees.
He was aware that some recent studies involving animals said cartilage might be more resilient than researchers previously thought.
The studies explored how running animals tended to have “thicker, healthier knee cartilage than comparable tissues from sedentary animals,” indicating that the cartilage for active animals had changed based on their running.
Miller speculated that cartilage in human runners’ knees likewise may alter and adapt overall.
“It looks like running is unlikely to cause knee arthritis by wearing out cartilage,” he told The Times’s Gretchen Reynolds.
Read the rest in The New York Times.