Joint pain may be linked to greater OA knee pain

The results of a soon-to-be published study show greater knee pain among patients with knee osteoarthritis who also have pain in other joints.

The study also linked low back pain, and ipsilateral foot and elbow pain with more severe knee pain, according to a press release.

“Our findings show that pain in the low back, foot and elbow may be associated with greater knee pain, confirming that symptomatic knee OA rarely occurs in isolation,” Pradeep Suri, MD, a lead author of the study, stated in the release. “Future studies are needed to determine whether treatment of pain occurring elsewhere in the body will improve therapy outcomes for knee OA.”

Suri and his colleagues studied 1,389 participants in the multicenter, population-based Osteoarthritis (OA) Initiative who were between the ages of 45 and 79 years old and had symptomatic knee OA. The investigators measured the participants’ knee pain using the WOMAC Index and asked if they also experienced pain in their lower back, shoulder, elbow, neck, wrist, hand, foot, ankle, knee or hip.

The investigators discovered that 57.4% of participants also had low back pain. They also found that these participants had a higher mean WOMAC pain score than those without back pain (6.5 vs. 5.2), according to the press release.

The study also revealed that pain in all of other joint locations was significantly associated with higher WOMAC knee pain scores. However, models analyzing pain locations simultaneously showed that only back pain, and ipsilateral foot and elbow pain were significantly linked with higher knee pain scores, according to the release.

In addition, the investigators found that participants who had pain in more than one location — regardless of site — had higher knee pain scores.

Reference:
Suri P. Arthritis Care Res. 2010 Aug 26. [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.1002/acr.20324.

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