Studies That Probably Didn’t Need to Be Done: Knee Pain Causes Activity Avoidance

Today, we’re on the lighter side.

This just in, from the annals of Captain Obvious:

Patients with early symptomatic osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee avoid performing normal daily physical activities because they are experiencing pain, findings of a large, longitudinal study suggest.

I found this amusing and will bite back on my natural inclination toward sarcasm. I do find rather intuitive the concept that if someone has been banged in the kneecaps with a lead pipe his appetite to weed the flowerbed or climb a set of stairs will rapidly diminish.

There were 828 subjects in the study aged 45 to 65 years (yes, it is somewhat of a shame that this huge sample size went to waste.)

You might say the study helps confirm the vicious cycle that when your knees hurt, you move them less and so your muscles weaken, which leads to your knees hurting more, so you move them even less and etc. You get the picture.

I will say, in this study’s defense, that one admirable thing about scientists is that they don’t take accepted wisdom for truth. Some studies reveal curious, unlikely things, but others simply look at something that we think should be true and confirm it.

In this case:

“The results support the validity of the avoidance model in persons with early symptomatic knee OA,” said study author Jasmijn Holla, from the Amsterdam Rehabilitation Research Center in Reade, the Netherlands.

True. But I’m just not convinced we needed a full-blown study to tell us that.