Knees Pay the Freight for Extra Weight

Our knees, it turns out, are a bit more delicate than we thought. A new study published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine found that a person whose body-mass index was even slightly over the healthy range was three times more likely to have a cartilage tear.  As the Chicago Sun-Times reports, researchers at the University of Utah who conducted the study believe that the high incidence of damage may result, not just from extra weight, but from the reduced blood flow to cartilage that is common in overweight people. The researchers estimate that extra weight probably leads to more than half of the nation’s 850,000 annual operations to repair cartilage tears in the knee.