Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common disease of the synovial joints, especially in professional athletes. Endurance training causes OA in joints, particularly their knee joint. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of volume and intensity of two different types of endurance training on the incidence of knee OA in healthy male rats.

Methods: In this experimental study, 24 rats were randomly divided into three groups of control, endurance 1 and endurance 2. The exercise included five days and a total of eight weeks of endurance exercise, including one hour intensity endurance running %50 to %55 percent for endurance 1 group, and for endurance 2, half-hour run with %70 to 75% of the oxygen consumed. In order to investigate  osteoarthritis, 24 hours after the last training session, joint sample tissues were collected. The amount of joint damage was evaluated by histopathology and method was compared with one-way ANOVA analysis.

Results: The results showed that none of the groups had no significant influence on the increase in cartilage thickness (p = 0.20). Also, an hour of endurance training caused moderate OA (grade 3) in the rat knee (p = 0.002) , but in the endurance training group with 30 minutes training moderate OA (grade II), (p = 0.002) was observed.