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Osteoarthritis affects roughly 10% of people over the age of 60 and is the second leading cause of years lost to disability in America. While joint replacement is effective at improving quality of life for individuals with end-stage osteoarthritis, conservative interventions to delay the need for this invasive procedure are desirable. Increased contact forces in the joint are thought to accelerate the structural progression of osteoarthritis, so many conservative interventions seek to reduce these forces.
Project Goal
Demers et al. (2014) used simulations to investigate the sensitivity of joint loading to systematic changes in the coordination strategy used to achieve experimentally measured walking kinematics. The results of this study suggest that recruiting the soleus more heavily than the gastrocnemius could reduce knee loads (adapted image below). Kinematics were fixed in this study, so it is not clear what compensatory kinematic and coordination changes would occur when adopting a gastrocnemius avoidance gait. The purpose of our study was to experimentally reproduce Demers' simulation results by testing if walking with gastrocnemius avoidance gait does reduce late stance knee loads.
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