You need to start protecting your knee joint at the age of 30 1. Why should I beware of osteoarthritis before the age of 30? Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease that used to be thought of as a disease unique to the elderly, but recently it has been discovered that human joints can develop as early as 30 years old, or even younger, with no symptoms of degenerative changes. When you reach the age of 40 or 50, symptoms will appear, indicating that the degeneration of the joint has already invaded your bones, and it is too late to start paying attention to it. 2. Besides age, what other factors can aggravate joint degeneration? Osteoarthritis has become an increasingly common and widespread disease as the human life course has lengthened. If you are in your 70s, you will inevitably experience joint pain, either in the knee, hip, lumbar or cervical spine. Osteoarthritis is not limited to changes in cartilage tissue. Damage or deformity to all the structures surrounding the joint, including muscles, bone, tendons and ligaments, can cause osteoarthritis. Age is not the only culprit either. Excess weight can put additional stress on the joints and can also be a cause of accelerated joint degeneration. 3.Does osteoarthritis of the knee hurt when walking on a flat road? Trauma or sports injuries can cause intra-articular fractures, or rupture of the cruciate ligaments and damage to the collateral ligaments, which can lead to instability of the knee joint and abnormal wear and tear of the articular cartilage, resulting in traumatic osteoarthritis. These patients have a typical history of knee trauma, and in addition to pain, they may experience weakness, joint interlocking or abnormal popping in the joint when walking, and may also experience joint instability. Simple knee degeneration first appears in the patellofemoral joint, and knee pain can appear in the 30s and 40s, manifesting as pain when going down steps and pain when standing up from a squat, but no discomfort when walking on a flat surface. When squatting, the knee joint can feel abnormal friction when touched with the hand. Some patients may also experience swelling of the joint. This stage of the disease is often diagnosed as “chondromalacia patellae”. 4. Will our normal walking and jogging accelerate the degeneration of the joint? Osteoarthritis of the knee is a very slow developing disease, taking more than 10 years or more from the first painful stage to the advanced stage of the disease. However, many factors can accelerate the progression of the disease, including significant internal or external knee deformities at a young age, being overweight, or work that places a greater burden on the knee joint, such as prolonged squatting and field work in mountainous areas. Regular exercise such as jogging and walking will not cause degeneration of the joint, except for people with obvious deformities of the knee joint. 5.How to protect the knee joint? Although many scientists have been working on early diagnosis methods for osteoarthritis, so far there is no diagnostic method that can diagnose osteoarthritis of the knee as easily and reliably as AIDS. However, if you feel any of these discomforts in your knee, you may want to try the following two types of therapeutic exercises: (1) Functional exercise: This includes joint movement and training of the surrounding muscle strength. The correct exercise method is to do non-weight-bearing activities under the condition that the knee joint is fully rested, and to do knee flexion and extension exercises in a sitting or lying position, combined with thigh muscle tensing exercises, to the extent that the pain is not aggravated. In addition, daily walks outdoors can be done at a distance that does not cause fatigue or pain. Repeated squatting or semi-squatting movements should be avoided when painful symptoms are severe. Climbing and senior disco are very bad for the knee joint, while swimming helps improve joint and muscle function. (2) Weight loss: One study found that if weight can be reduced by 5 kg, the symptoms of the knee joint will improve significantly.