How does osteoarthritis affect the knees?
Osteoarthritis affects knees by wearing down the joints from smooth surfaces to abrasive ones, explains HealthMaker Andrew Feldman, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at NYU Langone Medical Center. Learn more about this process in this video.
Transcript
What arthritis is, is basically a wearing away of that smooth surface down to a rough surface and, many times,
raw bone. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Imagine me having a completely smooth, frictionless surface. That's what a joint-- every joint in the body
has that, your shoulder, your finger, everything. So when you have two frictionless surface going across one another, they glide like two pieces
of glass-- perfect. Now I substitute one piece of glass for a piece of sandpaper, because what arthritis is, is basically a wearing away
of that smooth surface down to a rough surface and, many times, raw bone. Underneath the cartilage of the knee is raw bone.
Now you have an unsmooth surface on a smooth surface, for all intents and purposes, creating friction,
creating something called glucokines, which is a irritant that the body is throwing out
to try to heal it. The body kind of goes haywire because it says, I want to heal this. And it's throwing out all these things.
And it can't heal it. And that actually causes more irritation. So the arthritic condition is basically
a system where the gliding nature of the knee has been changed forever.
osteoarthritis
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