Osteoarthritis

Five years ago Jean Gott, then 67, fell off a ladder, breaking her left leg. "Even after the fracture healed, I was in pain for two years," she remembers. "It hurts even to stand to do housework. I'd developed osteoarthritis in my knees." At 195 pounds, Gott had been trying to lose weight for years. Determined to take some pressure off her knees, she began a low-calorie diet and lost ten pounds. At this point, she says, "My pain was gone." The change enabled Gott to walk a mile a day. Over the next year and a half, she took off another 17 pounds. She says her knees remain pain-free. Doctors confirm that being even moderately overweight increases the pain of arthritis in weight-bearing joints, especially the hip and knees. Says Dr. Roland Moskowitz, professor of medicine at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, "For every pound you are overweight, you put three to five pounds of extra weight on each knee as you walk." A ten-pound loss, therefore, takes 30 to 50 pounds of extra pressure off your knees. Studies also suggest that heavier people are more likely to develop osteoarthritis. Most convincing is research on osteoarthritis of the knee -- a condition six times than in lean people, and particularly common in overweight women. Dr. David Felson, professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, studied nearly 800 women over a decade, tracking their weight and the onset of osteoarthritis in their knees. He found that those who lost weight -- an average of 11 pounds -- were 50 percent less likely to develop osteoarthritis of the knees.