When Walking Do Your Knees Snap, Crackle and Pop?

Tears in Knee Cartilage are common in older adults. But that does not automatically mean surgery.

The New England Journal of medicine recently reported that knee damage is a common problem for middle age and older people. Investigators looked at MRI’s, of people who were not complaining of any pain at the time. The meniscus is a shock-absorbing cartilage in the knee.

According to the editorial, meniscal tears do not necessarily cause knee pain, and doctors should look for other causes, such as arthritis, before contemplating surgery to address the tear.
To see how often meniscal damage happens along with knee pain and stiffness, they studied MRI scans of the right knee of 991 randomly selected, ambulatory adults, between ages 50 and 90. MRI revealed meniscal damage in 35 percent of subjects. Damage was more common among men than women, and increased with age, affecting more than 50 percent of subjects over the age of 69. Most tears were in people who had not had any pain, aching, or stiffness in the previous month, the authors report.

Knee X-rays were performed for 963 of the subjects to look for arthritis. The authors found that up to 63 percent of subjects with arthritis had meniscal tears compared with no more than 32 percent of subjects without arthritis.

Although a meniscal tear may signal early arthritis, the team points out, "other structures or processes...may be causing the pain," such as joint inflammation or bone marrow lesions. Surgical removal of the meniscus, a common procedure, is unlikely to have much effect on symptoms in patients with arthritis, they add.

So what this means to you and me is that if an X-ray or MRI does find a tear in a knee, it does not automatically mean that the tear is the cause of the pain, and we should look for alternative causes before “Going under the Knife”

In one of the most recent clinical trials done on the components in Joint-Rx, 252 patients with osteoarthritis of the knee showed significant improvement in joint mobility versus those on placebo.

The major goal in the research and development of Joint-Rx was to improve the repair process of collagen matrices and regeneration of the connective tissue cells. Joint-Rx has been shown to stimulate the production of collagen, which is the protein portion of fibrous material that holds joints together. It also stimulates cartilage production; repairs damaged joints, and maintains the resiliency in both cartilage and joints.