MRI tracks connection between obesity and knee cartilage

Has the sight of a morbidly obese person making his or her way down a supermarket aisle ever led you to wonder what all that weight is doing to the person’s knees? Data from a study supported by the National Institute on Aging indicates it’s probably doing a lot of cartilage damage. “As obesity is one of the few established risk factors for osteoarthritis, it is not surprising that obesity may also precede and predict rapid cartilage loss,” said principal investigator Dr. Frank Roemer, an associate professor of radiology at Boston University. Roemer and colleagues at research institutions in the U.S. and Germany assessed 336 patients from the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study, a prospective trial that has enrolled more than three thousand subjects either at risk for osteoarthritis or who have been diagnosed with the condition. Their review included 347 knees with minimal or no baseline cartilage damage at MRI. Nearly 70% of these patients were women with an average body mass index of 29.5 (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identifies that number as on the line between overweight and obese for adults).

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