How To Clearly Tell Where You Are In The 4 Stages Of Knee Arthritis

In this video, I’m going to answer the question how long does it actually take knee osteoarthritis to progress? This is a difficult question to answer because the ranges are vast. But before I get into the normal progression of osteoarthritis in knees that the typical progression, we’ll call it in this video, we need to talk about something that is being currently defined called accelerated knee osteoarthritis.

Now, I first learned about this concept of accelerated knee osteoarthritis through a study that I’ve linked in the description below a research article, and I’m going to read you the title here, it’s called risk factors, and then natural history of accelerated knee osteoarthritis, a narrative review, and you can find the link to it with public access download in the description below, if you want to check it out.

Let me summarize a few points from this study for you. In case you’re not much of a research reader, there was a lot of huge multi syllable words in that article, and you might fall asleep after reading the abstract. But something that’s interesting about the article is it says that as many as a one in seven people with knee osteoarthritis develop accelerated knee osteoarthritis.

And now accelerated knee osteoarthritis means that you go from having really no signs of knee osteoarthritis to full blown severe knee osteoarthritis where your stiffness is off the charts, you can’t walk on your knee can’t put pressure on the knee, and it’s looking like you definitely are going to need a knee replacement anytime soon. So because they’re defining this as being within four years, then I’m going to assume that typical knee arthritis is anything beyond that timeframe.

So if your progression towards severe knee arthritis is anything beyond that, like 567 years and beyond, it could be decades, even, like 20 years, or 30 years. And that’s more of a typical progression of knee osteoarthritis, but going back to accelerated knee osteoarthritis, because you might be in this situation, where you’re fine just a couple of years ago, and all of a sudden, your knee is really, really bad.

The study did mention that some people even go from zero to severe knee osteoarthritis within one year within 12 months. And the majority of these people that go through accelerated knee osteoarthritis are getting a knee replacement, within nine years of first getting diagnosed with osteoarthritis, with a median or like the middle number being 2.3 years, it’s really many of them are getting in the replacement early on within three years of having arthritis symptoms, that’s really fast.

And some risk factors that they put it out in this study, as putting people at higher risk for developing accelerated knee arthritis, which I think apply to just knee arthritis in general anyway, but that’s what they mentioned in the study said being older and age which obvious right? The older you are, the more likely you are to be showing signs of arthritis is kind of just how we age on the inside of our body, like getting gray hairs or wrinkles on your skin, our bones degenerate a little bit or degenerate isn’t really the best word they change, I think is the best way.

Because I wouldn’t really call my gray hairs degeneration or my wrinkles, degeneration, it’s just aging. Another risk factor is being overweight. Also kind of pretty obvious. They found in this study that people that tended to be overweight, tended to progress into accelerated knee osteoarthritis a little bit more than people that went the typical knee arthritis route.

The third risk factor was joint alignment problems, and they’re talking about things like being bow legged, or knock kneed. The fourth risk factor is having osteoarthritis already present on the other leg. If you already have knee osteoarthritis on one side, then you’re way more likely to get it on the non-involved side. And the fifth risk factor is having old knee injuries, maybe in your youth, or in previous years leading up to getting knee osteoarthritis.

Now let’s talk about typical knee arthritis progression. And I’m going to talk about what I see with my clients, they have usually had a series of knee injuries over time, because on the spectrum here for you, let’s take my fancy drawing here. So on this end over here, and I didn’t put years or timeframes on this, because it really varies.

So you can I think that the easiest thing to do would be to put this like on a 10 year timeframe or a 20 year time frame event, because that’s typically when it starts when people are getting into their 50s and 60s, that’s when the arthritis starts to develop. And then by the time they get into their 70s and 80s. It tends to be really bad if they haven’t been doing the correct things for them.

So early on, say in their early 50s People have a knee injury, so I labeled this knee injury number one, and then knee injury number two, maybe a few years later, the classic sign is you know, they just overdid it one day doing yard work or they went on a trip, or they just walked a lot more than they typically do. They took a bad step handling their dog their big dog got in the way they took a bad step and tweaked their knee, things like that.

They started a new exercise program to try to manage their weight and something just flared up their knee. It got swollen, it got stiff for a while maybe they had a meniscus tear that happens to Sometimes, and then they might end up having a meniscus surgery. That’s what I wrote in red here. A surgery is a controlled injury, you have to think about that.

Because a lot of people think of surgery as being, you know, something that’s healing, but it’s actually damaging to your body. But the hopes is that they they’re doing it in a very strategic way, the surgeons are injuring you in a very strategic way, in order that you’ll heal better than how they left you how they found you, rather than to leave you better than how they found you. But it is technically an injury to the body.

So if you have had a meniscus surgery, I’ll talk about that a little bit more, it actually puts you at more risk for having knee arthritis, we’ll get to that point in just a minute. Keep watching, keep listening, you’re watching. So you have had some prior injuries in your knee, like I just said, or maybe you had like a an ACL injury, when you’re playing high school sports, those kinds of risk factors are what leads you to this point here.

Maybe this could have been 10 years before, this might have been in your youth here, maybe you hit your 60s right here, where you have your first sign of osteoarthritis OA on an x ray. So you finally get bad enough to where you decide to go to the doctor, they do an x ray. And for the first time ever, a doctor tells you, you have arthritis visible on your X ray, that’s this landmark right here.

Then the next progression a few years after that, it could be one year if you have a faster progression, it could be five or 10 years, this depends on your specific situation, then you start to get more stiffness, pain and swelling in the in the knee, it just begins to happen more often, it’s probably already happening right here.

But it’s happening significantly more often here and is starting to become bothersome like it’s interrupting your day, it’s slowing you down in the mornings, you can’t get going as fast as you used to be able to many people are retiring around this age. So their activity levels are changing. If you’ve been you know sitting at a desk all day long or in a stuck at a job, and then you want to go pursue the things that you hadn’t been able to get around to, which requires you being more active.

This is slowing you down. That’s one of the things that I see here in the clinic all the time, then a big landmark is when you lose motion, this is loss of motion, when you have losses of motion in your knee joint because of the arthritis.

In other words, you can’t straighten out the knee all the way or you can bend the knee all the way, then you start facing some very consistent problems like getting in and out of a tub getting in and out of a car because you can’t bend your knee driving can be difficult to because you have to with your right leg, step on the pedal, or I guess left leg if you’re in England or Hong Kong, certain areas of the world, the drive on the other side of the highway.

But that’s a landmark problem right there. And so just to recap, all this would have taken years to get to here. And along the way, you wouldn’t have known that you have arthritis here, you would know right here at this point right here.

And even then sometimes people aren’t sure they have arthritis, or the doctor might even downplay and say you have little wear and tear in your joint, but don’t worry about it rest, and you’ll be okay. And then they start getting into the stiffness. And we’ll have another doctor’s visit right here where they say, hey, your knee looks worse.

Now you have some loss of motion. And associated with that. Then over here, the second orange paragraph here are blurred is consistent stiffness, pain and swelling. So here, it’s not consistent yet it’s more intermittent, it’s happening. You know, once a month, maybe once a week, maybe a few times a month, it’s associated with being more active with maybe exercising too much. Over here, it’s happening all the time, even when you don’t do things that are out of the norm.

It’s just stiff constantly, then it might progress for another several years. And then you end up getting to the point where using a walker or cane, you’re probably following up with the doctors at this point. By this point, it could have been 10 plus years, maybe even 15 or 20. To get to the point where you’re thinking, I need a total knee replacement. And the doctor has been probably teasing along the way saying, come back in five or 10 years, you know, I’ll give you an injection this time.

But here in five or 10 years, if you’re still needing an injection if your knee arthritis is worse on the X ray might be time for a knee replacement. So all in all, this timeframe here can take 10 years, 20 years, maybe even five years. And if we’re talking about the accelerated knee arthritis, it’s four years or less. Some people progress through it in as little as one year in 12 months. It very much depends on all those risk factors I mentioned.

The obesity being older in your years having osteoarthritis on the other leg having alignment problems like your bow legged or your Knock Kneed and having more prior injuries sets you up to be more likely to get knee arthritis sooner. Now let’s talk about meniscus surgeries for just a moment.

There have been studies over In Europe, where they’re socialized health care where they can do these studies a little easier than here where we have capitalistic health care in the United States, because the funding is a big deal about that. They have looked at doing placebo meniscectomy surgeries. meniscectomy means they take a chunk out of the meniscus out, show you what that looks like.

So, in between the bones here, there’s a big chunk of cartilage. It’s that special in the knee joint. It’s called the meniscus. And if it tears, doctors will often recommend doing a meniscectomy, where they take usually a chunk of the meniscus out that’s what ectopy means, it means removal. And so they don’t typically take the whole thing out, there are reports of that happening, but I don’t think your knee would function.

Normally, if they took up the whole meniscus easily just take a piece out of flapper the part that’s torn, or sometimes we’ll do a reconstruction where they were they sew it together. But they were looking at meniscectomy, where they took a chunk out. And what they found in this study, which is a sidenote, they found that in where they did placebo meniscectomy is where they went in, like they were going to do a mastectomy, but they actually didn’t they left the meniscus alone.

Those that group of people that got the placebo meniscus surgery, versus the people that actually got meniscectomy is both of the groups got better. So now we’re questioning Do we even need to get a meniscectomy. But the more interesting point regarding knee arthritis is they followed up with these people two years, and even five years later.

And they found that the people that had the real meniscectomy surgeries were more likely to develop osteoarthritis in their knee, versus the people that had the placebo meniscectomy surgeries where they left their meniscus alone, and did not remove a chunk of it. So this begs the question, even if you have a torn meniscus, it may still be cushioning your knee joint very well, even in a torn states.

And you need that piece of meniscus in your body to prevent the worst situation from happening, which is developing arthritis quicker than normal. That’s why on this timeline that I wrote here, I really think if you can if you’re able to if you can control your meniscus problem, and you can not do this, right, you’re going to get a meniscus surgery, it might delay you running into all these other problems.

And let me give you four tips on how to slow down the progression of arthritis and possibly even stop it to where you just hang out in one of these areas indefinitely until the end of your life. Because that would be great if you can stretch out this segment right here where you have your first sign of OAE on an x ray.

But you don’t really run into stiffness and pain and swelling or whatever area you’re in, if you can just stop it right there and reach the end of your life, you know, get to 8090 100 plus years old and your knees are holding that would be a fantastic situation, so that you don’t have to get any replacement. So four tips.

The first tip, biggest problem that you can fix is fix the muscle imbalances. I talked about that a lot on this channel. And I think it’s a very, very, very underrated thing to pursue. In a knee arthritis situation, there’s usually too much compressive forces going through the knee joint. And that’s what pushes the cartilage on itself.

So pushes this bottom bone up into the thigh bone, and the kneecap down onto that thigh bone as well. And that compressive force is what rubs the joint way too hard inappropriately as well. And it begins to cause irritation inflammation in the body just responds to the irritation and inflammation by building more blood vessels to bring more blood to the area to try to heal it, it creates more fluid inside the joint by so that’s why you get swelling.

It’s doing its normal responses, which is seen as an arthritic flare up. And if you just stay in that state, if you keep that pressure there, it progresses you into worse and worse in your arthritis situations.

Well, if you can take that pressure away by fixing the muscle imbalance, then you can stop the progression of knee arthritis, which you’ve got to do to take the pressure off is avoid strengthening your quads, the front of your thigh so you cannot be strengthening your quads too much because that’s going to increase that pressure in the knee joints.

And what you shouldn’t be strengthening instead is your glute muscles, the glute muscles when strengthened appropriately without focusing on the quads, it tends to take immense pressure off the knee joint. And that’s what really sets people up towards healing their knee arthritis for the long term that it’s not progressing.

Now we’ve got a program called the knee arthritis recovery program where we go in depth into fixing that muscle imbalance. You can learn more about it down in the description below. There’s a link for it.

The second tip is to reduce a risk factors, which means you lose some weight if you’ve got weight to lose because not everybody has weight to lose if you’re a relatively thin person or if you’re in a good weight, or even if you’re just 10, 20 even 30 pounds overweight, you probably don’t need to focus on the weight as much as you do like the muscle imbalance the previous tip that I just gave you, but if your weight is truly excessive, you know, it’s like 7080 100 pounds or more, that might be the priority for you.

It’s related to reducing your risk factors. If your knee arthritis isn’t that bad right now, but you’ve got old injuries that you haven’t quite recovered from all the way. Or better yet, this is advice you can give to the youngsters around you in your life, your family and friends who haven’t developed arthritis yet, but you know that they’re probably on the same path as maybe you are. Tell them and tell yourself to manage your old injuries.

Very often, if you had an injury back in high school back in your teens or your 20s. And it never really got resolved, there’s things that you can do to make sure that that gets better. Fixing the old injury helps you to make sure that the mechanics of the way that your joints moving on the inside normalizes as you go on in later years, and that helps you to prevent those bad forces going through your knee.

So I really think it’s wise, if you have some injury, playing sports in your youth, in your early years doing address 100%. Don’t fix it, you know, 50% and 7080 90%, fix it 100%. So that is a thing that never bothers you again, in the future. You hear doctors saying that all the time, they’ll say oh, did you have to play sports in high school to play soccer?

Did you play football, whatever it might be, were you involved in running a lot, and he was sort of running sports. That’s why you have all this wear and tear on your knee. And the reality is, it’s not the sports themselves, because the problem that leads to osteoarthritis, it’s the unresolved injuries that you sustained during those activities that you just carried with you and never fix them.

It’s like, if you got a flat tire on your bike or your car, and you just kept riding around on a flat tire, your car’s going to wear out. But if you fix that tire, you’ll last longer, you’ll be able to do everything you want to do. The third recommendation is to start supplements now, and you really have to give it a good solid two months to determine its effectiveness for you. And some people don’t even feel like a huge effect of it.

But so they’ll stop taking supplements. What I would encourage you to do is take the supplements anyway, commit to taking supplements on a regular basis. And I’m talking about conjoined glucosamine MSM. I’m going to link in the description here below a supplement that I recommend to my clients here. And you can get that way you get another one if you find one that you like better, some people get stomach problems a certain ones.

If you have allergies to shellfish, they make it out of shellfish. So you might find a different one that’s made from different substances, you have to do some research to find the best one that works for you. But I would strongly encourage you to start supplements regularly. Don’t expect it to have an effect within a week or two of taking it, you really have to measure it after a couple of months of taking it. And chances are you’re doing other things to help out with the supplements.

So it’s hard to fully pin it down on the supplements helped me yes or no. But in reality, it’s a multi faceted approach meaning you’re fixing the muscle imbalances. You’re losing weight, you’re being careful about what activities you’re doing. You’re taking supplements, you’re watching, you know inflammatory foods in your diet.

It’s a combination of all those things coming together to make sure that you set up your knees for the best long term health and starting to take some supplements on a regular basis is significantly cheaper and gives you a much better quality of life than having to get any replacement later on. It’s my fourth tip and slowing down the progression, even stopping the arthritis is to get some professional help.

Find an expert that specializes in helping people avoid knee replacement surgeries. If you can find an expert in your area, that would be the best thing to do. Because even just for a one time visit a consultation to make sure you’re on the right path. Maybe you do need regular visits with them to make sure that you’re doing the right thing on a consistent basis.

But getting professional help goes a very long way for the quality of life that you can keep up for indefinitely till the last days you have here on Earth, you need to make sure that you’re guided in the right way. Many times, you know I’m a professional that I’d recommend seeing of course, what I find is there’s little restrictions in motion in the joint.

There’s small alignment problems. I’m also coaching people on exactly how to exercise because even though you know I have videos here on this channel on how to exercise, you need help sometimes to figure out what you’re doing wrong because you’re not getting the effect that you’re looking for. It may not be that it’s the wrong exercise for you very well maybe that it’s the right exercise for you.

You’re just doing it wrong. And if you can get some professional help on doing the exercise correctly in your specific situation in your condition that might make the difference in making that exercise successful for you so that you’re not dealing with this knee problem getting worse and worse as the years go on. And then suffering a knee replacement later. Ron that you didn’t need to have I hope this video was helpful for you please give it a thumbs up if you thought it was helpful share it with somebody that you think needs to see this and I’ll see you in the next video bye