Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Strong muscles are important for knee health. People with weak leg muscles have worse knee arthritis and have a harder time getting around on a daily basis. For research, it's important that we obtain consistent measures how strong someone's muscles are. Consistent measurements are important so that we can test and determine when someone's strength has truly changed, and determine what caused that change. Currently, we don't know how consistent our measures of muscle strength are for people with arthritis. This research project included an experiment that used statistics to determine the best method to measure muscle strength. This study found that we can't take any measurement of strength, but instead we have to take one of three specific measurements taken out of a total of 10 measurements. This finding is important because it indicates that studies of people with arthritis, and potentially other studies need to be careful with how they collect their data to make sure the results are consistent.