Athletes Prone to Joint, Bone Problems

LONDON (Reuters) - Athletes may be in top shape but the grueling physical activity and competition to which they subject themselves increases their risk of suffering bone and joint problems, researchers said on Monday.

British soccer players are 10 times more likely to develop osteoarthritis in their hip than other men and long-distance runners are more prone to low bone mineral density, which can lead to fractures and the brittle-bone disease osteoporosis.

"We suspect it is just the nature of the sport. It is almost analogous to an industrial injury," said Gordon Shepard, an orthopedic surgeon at the Royal Bolton Hospital in Lancashire, northern England.

Shepard and his colleagues studied the rate of osteoarthritis in 68 football managers who had been former players and 136 men who had never played football. Their research is reported in The British Journal of Sports Medicine.

They discovered that nine of the former players suffered from osteoarthritis, even if they have not had a serious hip injury, and six of them had had a total of eight hip replacements between them. But there were only two cases of the illness in the non-footballers.

"There was about a 10-fold difference between the ex-professional players and non-professionals," Shepard added in an interview.

There were not only more cases of the illness among former footballers, they also had hip replacements in their late 30s and early 40s, which is uncommon at such a young age in a small group of people.

Shepard believes that footballers probably sustained minor groin and other injuries which increased the risk of osteoarthritis, an illness in which the joints wear out.

In a separate study in the journal, Dr. Melanie Burrows and researchers at the University of East London found that instead of increasing bone mineral density in female athletes, long distance running lowered it.

By measuring the bone density of 52 women who ran between 5 and 70 km (3 and 43 miles) a week, they discovered a link between lower bone density in the spine and hip and running greater distances, even after taking account of differences such as diet, size and age.

But they found that the heavier women in the study, who had more muscle than fat, had a higher bone density, similar to athletes who do weightlifting, gymnastics and volleyball.

"It may not be the exercise mode alone that affects bone mineral density but the force applied to the limbs during such exercise and the resulting effects on body composition," Burrows said in the journal.

Reference Source 89

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