Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Knee osteoarthritis is an incurable disease characterized by the breakdown of cartilage which cushions the ends of bones in your knee joint. This condition is an expensive cause of disability in Canada, with annual costs of more than $27.5 billion. Experts recommend regular exercise to self-manage knee osteoarthritis through improving pain and function while slowing disease progression. While running is a cheap and popular physical activity across Canada, many people with osteoarthritis stop running or hesitate to start because they are unsure if it is safe to participate in an activity which involves high impacts. However, current scientific evidence does not support the wide-spread belief that running can lead to or aggravate knee osteoarthritis, and stopping running could have a bad impact on a person's quality of life. My research will compare how healthy and arthritic knee cartilage respond to running. In people with and without knee osteoarthritis, I will use medical imaging to look at cartilage inside their knee joints, and assess the movement patterns of their legs while they run. I will also test out ways to change their running technique to help reduce their pain. My findings will allow us to understand how the knee joints of people with osteoarthritis react to the heavy loads experienced by the body during running. Using this information, we can eventually make recommendations about the safety of running with respect to knee joint health.