04/28/2023    

RELEVANT RESEARCH

What Running Does to the Knees of Marathon Runners: Survey

 

Runners often hear the warning, “Keep pounding the pavement and you’ll destroy your knees.” A new study found that runners were not more likely to develop hip or knee osteoarthritis the longer, faster and more frequently they ran. The new research surveyed 3,804 recreational runners who participated in the Chicago Marathon in 2019 or 2021 with questions from how many years they’d been running and their average running paces to whether they had family histories of arthritis.

 

Surprisingly, they found no association between an increased risk for knee or hip arthritis and the number of years someone had been running, the number of marathons completed, their weekly running mileage, nor their running pace. Overall, 7.3% of marathon runners who answered the survey said they’d ever been diagnosed with hip or knee osteoarthritis. 

 

Source: Caroline Hopkins, NBC News [3/7/23] via Dr. Bret Ribotsky