The age for knee replacement surgery has fallen due to the obesity crisis, a new study has found.
Those with the highest body mass index (BMI) had surgery up to seven years earlier than those of a healthy weight.
More than half of the patients undergoing the procedure were obese, according to researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
According to the study, obese women are 17 times more likely to have a knee replacement than their leaner counterparts.
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The researchers found that of the 56,217 patients in the study who underwent knee replacements for osteoarthritis (OA), 57.7 percent were obese.
In the UK, 1 in 5 people over the age of 45 suffer from osteoarthritis of the knee. Depending on where you live, up to six out of every thousand people of this age have a knee prosthesis.
The University of Queensland Rural Clinical School (UQRCS) study compared data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) National Health Survey 2017-18 to the Australian Orthopedic Association’s National Joint Replacement Registry.
UQRCS research director and associate professor Srinivas Kondalsamy-Chennakesavan said the impact on women was striking.
He said: “Obese women aged 55 to 64 are up to 17.3 times more likely to have a knee replacement than their healthy counterparts, while overweight men in the same age group are up to 5.8 times more likely to have a knee replacement.” receive.”
He added, “Obese patients with the highest BMI ratios were also, on average, seven years younger if they had knee replacements compared to normal weight subjects.”
The study’s lead investigator, published in the ANZ Journal of Surgery, Dr. Chris Wall said, “Moderate weight loss was found to be effective in reducing symptoms of knee osteoarthritis, and overweight patients who maintained a 10 percent weight loss experienced significant improvements in pain and function.”
He added: “By 2030, more than 161,000 knee replacement surgeries are expected to be performed annually.
“Urgent action is needed at the national level to change our approach to reducing obesity as Australia may face a growing burden of revision knee replacements in the future.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), obesity has almost tripled worldwide since 1975.
The WHO said that in 2016 over 1.9 billion adults were overweight and that number included over 650 million obese people.
The WHO also said that in 2020, 39 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese.
This story was provided to Newsweek by Zenger News.