Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint disease characterised by the breakdown of cartilage in the knee, leading to pain, stiffness, and decreased mobility. Everyone’s joints go through a normal cycle of damage and repair during their lifetime, but sometimes the body’s process to repair our joints can cause changes in their shape or structure. When these changes happen in one or more of your joints, it’s known as osteoarthritis.
A joint is a part of the body where two or more bones meet – in your knee, it’s the thigh and shin bones. There is also a small bone at the front of the knee called the patella or kneecap. The ends of our bones are covered in a smooth and slippery surface, known as cartilage (car-ti-lidge). This allows the bones to move against each other without friction, and protects your joint from stress.
Your knee also has two other rings of a different type of cartilage known as menisci or meniscus, which help to share weight evenly across your knee joint, and there’s also cartilage underneath your kneecap.
Osteoarthritis causes the cartilage in your knee joint to thin and the surfaces of the joint to become rougher, which means that the knee doesn’t move as smoothly as it should, and it might feel painful and stiff.
Common symptoms include:
- Pain: Typically worsens with activity and improves with rest.
- Stiffness: Especially noticeable after periods of inactivity.
- Swelling: Due to inflammation and fluid accumulation.
- Reduced range of motion: Difficulty bending or straightening the knee.
- Crepitus: A grinding sensation or sound when moving the joint.
Risk factors include age, obesity, previous joint injuries, and genetics. Management strategies often include:
- Lifestyle modifications: Weight loss and low-impact exercises to strengthen muscles around the knee.
- Physical therapy: To improve flexibility and strength.
- Medications: Pain relievers like acetaminophen or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).
- Injections: Corticosteroids or hyaluronic acid may provide temporary relief.
- Surgery: In severe cases, options like arthroscopy, osteotomy, or knee replacement might be considered.
If you have osteoarthritis of the knee, you will probably feel your knee is painful and stiff at times. It may only affect one knee, especially if you’ve injured it in the past, or you could have it in both. The pain may feel worse at the end of the day, or when you move your knee, and it may improve when you rest. You might have some stiffness in the morning, but this won’t usually last more than half an hour.
The pain can be felt all around your knee, or just in a certain place such as the front and sides. It might feel worse after moving your knee in a particular way, such as going up or down stairs.
Sometimes, people have pain that wakes them up in the night. You’ll probably find that the pain varies and that you have good and bad days.
You might find you can’t move your knee as easily or as far as normal, or it might creak or crunch as you move it.
Sometimes your knee might look swollen. This can be caused by two things:
- Hard swelling: when the bone at the edge of the joint grows outwards, forming bony spurs, called osteophytes (os-tee-o-fites).
- Soft swelling: when your joint becomes inflamed and produces extra fluid, sometimes called an effusion or water on the knee.
Sometimes osteoarthritis of the knee can cause the muscles in the thighs to weaken, so your leg may look thinner. This weakness can make the joint feel unstable and could cause the knee to give way when you put weight on it.
Contact us or book online today to get your knee pain back under control!
J. Press
Physiotherapist