Daily HealthBeat Tip - March 30, 2007

Did the exercise do it?

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Walkers and other exercisers in middle age and older might get osteoarthritis in the knee, and blame it on the pounding they gave their knees while they were working out.

But did that do the damage?

Boston University researcher David Felson checked a long-running study of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. His report in Arthritis Care and Research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Felson says exercise didn’t seem to cause the problem:

"Those who were exercising had no different risk of developing knee osteoarthritis than those who were not exercising." (7 seconds)

Felson says exercisers needn’t worry exercise will give them knee osteoarthritis. But he says they can’t expect exercise to protect them against knee osteoarthritis. And he says he can’t tell much about runners because he had too few in the study.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: April, 06 2007