None — BACKGROUND: When cartilage deteriorates in joints and causes bones to rub against each other, osteoarthritis often develops. When the condition takes place in the knee, bone and cartilage develop cracks and fissures that worsen over time, especially with high-impact activities that involve twisting, jumping and pivoting.
A recent study found even weekend warriors are prone to arthritis. Injuries that occurred in middle-aged people who showed no symptoms and had a healthy weight were more common and more severe in those who exercised more. Activities linked to a higher incidence or arthritis included sports, exercise, yard work and housework. Lower-impact exercise like swimming and cycling were found to have a protective effect against arthritis.
TREATMENT: Surgery is a last resort for treatment of osteoarthritis. Non-surgical treatments include lifestyle modifications to avoid further impact to the affected area, exercise and medications like anti-inflammatories and corticosteroid injections. Surgeries to treat arthritis of the knee include cleaning debris and repairing tears through arthroscopy; osteotomy to cut the shinbone or thighbone to improve alignment of the knee; total replacement of the knee joint; or cartilage grafting for patients with limited cartilage loss.
A new surgical option still in research is cartilage transplantation. Joseph Guettler, M.D., an orthopaedic surgeon at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., harvests cartilage cells from an uninjured area of a patient's knee and sends the cells to a lab where they are grown and multiplied for six weeks. The cells are then injected back into the knee under a patch that covers the depleted area. Full recovery can take a year, and Dr. Guettler says the transplantation procedure is for patients who have not yet developed arthritis, but are at risk. "We are filling their pothole and thus decreasing the chance of them progressing to degenerative arthritis as they age," Dr. Guettler explained to Ivanhoe.