Muscle Forces May Explain Paradoxical Knee Loads During Different Gait Patterns Available to Purchase

Medial compartment knee osteoarthritis is a common clinical disorder [1] in which the articular cartilage in the medial compartment progressively deteriorates. To slow disease progression without surgical intervention, researchers have proposed gait modifications to offload the medial compartment. Since knee medial contact force (MCF) cannot be measured non-invasively in vivo, researchers have identified the external knee adduction moment (KAM) as a surrogate measure that is easy to calculate [2]. A common assumption has been that reducing the peak KAM will result in a corresponding reduction in peak MCF. While the magnitude of the peak KAM has been correlated with disease severity and rate of disease progression [3,4], it is not clear that reduction of this external load via gait modification will always result in a decrease in internal MCF.