Noisy knees could be a sign of osteoarthritis, according to a new study

The cracking sounds that your knees are making could be a sign of osteoarthritis, doctors say. The condition, known as crepitus, could offer an early indication of the onset of the most common type of arthritis that affects the joints.

The crackle or pop sound that knees make could be an early indicator for the onset of osteoarthritis, doctors from the Baylor College of Medicine surmise in a recently published study in the journal of Arthritis Care & Research.

Doctors call these cracking or popping sounds, crepitus. Crepitus can affect the bones, in which case a sound can be heard when two fragments of a fracture are moved against each other,  but most of the times, crepitus has been used to describe the noise and the pain associated with the eroded cartilage around the joints.

Dr Grace Lo, assistant professor of medicine in the section of immunology, allergy, and rheumatology at Baylor, wanted to know if the frequency with which patients are hearing their knees pop could be linked to osteoarthritis.

“Osteoarthritis is the most common type of arthritis that affects the knee joint,” said Dr Grace Lo. “We wanted to see if complaints about popping or snapping in the knee joint, also known as crepitus, were predictive of symptomatic knee osteoarthritis, which is a combination of a frequent history of pain as well as radiographic evidence of knee osteoarthritis.”

Doctor Lo looked at data collected by the Osteoarthritis Initiative and found that people with crepitus are more likely to develop symptomatic osteoarthritis over the next year than those that did not complain of their joints crackling.

The findings also show that about 75% of symptomatic knee osteoarthritis cases came from those in the study who had radiographic evidence at baseline but did not complain of frequent knee pain.

This study indicates that those who have evidence of osteoarthritis on a radiograph but do not have symptoms yet and hear creaking in their knee joints are in the group of people who are at risk of developing chronic symptoms, Lo said.

The research could help doctors in preventing the onset of osteoarthritis by paying closer attention to contributing factors, like obesity, once the patients complain about hearing their knees popping.

Osteoarthritis is a long-term chronic disease characterized by the deterioration of cartilage in joints which results in bones rubbing together and creating stiffness, pain, and impaired movement. The disease most commonly affects the joints in the knees, hands, feet, and spine and is relatively common in the shoulder and hip joints.

According to the World Health Organization, while osteoarthritis is related to aging, it is also associated with a variety of both modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors, including obesity, according to a new study obesity, lack of exercise, genetic predisposition, bone density, occupational injury, trauma, and gender.