CORRECTION: Weight loss may reduce arthritis disability

By Charnicia Huggins

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Overweight adults with
osteoarthritis who lose just five percent of their body weight
can reduce the amount of physical disability associated with
this most common form of inflammatory joint disease, results of
several studies suggest.

“It is more or less proven now that the most effective
thing, if you have osteoarthritis of the knee, is weight loss,”
study co-author Henning Bliddal, of HS Frederiksberg Hospital
in Copenhagen, told Reuters Health.

“As such, weight reduction therapy in overweight
osteoarthritic patients is a very appealing goal, both with
regards to disease-specific pain and disability reduction as
well as for overall health benefits such as cardiovascular risk
reduction,” co-author Robin Christensen, also of HS
Frederiksberg Hospital, said in a statement.

To explore the association, Bliddal, Christensen, and their
colleagues searched various databases to identify studies
involving patients with knee osteoarthritis who experienced a
change in weight.

In the four studies that met their criteria, they found
that study participants experienced less pain and disability
upon losing weight. Those four studies included more than 500
individuals.

The association between the study participants’ weight loss
and their reduced physical disability “seemed convincing,”
based on those findings, the researchers report.

In fact, computer models predicted that a weight loss of at
least 5.02 percent, within a set time period, would
significantly reduce physical disability in overweight
individuals with osteoarthritis, study findings indicate.

A weight loss of 10 percent, however, “results in moderate
-to-large improvement in self-reported physical disability,”
Christensen noted.

In light of these findings, Bliddal advises overweight
individuals “to lose 10 percent of their weight within two
months.”

The best way to lose the weight is not by simply increasing
their level of physical activity, however. “You can’t exercise
your weight down, you have to do something about your food,”
Bliddal said, adding that these patients should “start losing
the weight first, and then exercise.”

In so doing, “your knees will last longer,” he said.

The findings were presented last week during the 7th Annual
European Congress of Rheumatology in Amsterdam.