Avaliação da atividade funcional excêntrica em portadores de osteoartrite de joelho

Abstract

Patients with osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee show loss of functional independence, presenting difficulties in performing tasks that require high demand of the knee joint, such as stair descent. However, it is unclear how muscular and biomechanical changes were present in patients with OA in the early stages. Thus, the purpose of this study was to analyze the kinetics, kinematics and muscle activation in stair descent, in men with early degrees of knee OA and compare with a healthy control group. We evaluated 31 volunteers divided into two groups. Osteoarthritis Group (OAG) with 17 men with knee OA grade I or II (53+6 years) and Control Group (CG) with 14 healthy men (50+6 years). We performed kinematic evaluation of the stair descent in the sagittal plane for evaluation of the knee flexion angles. Moreover, electromyography (EMG) of vastus lateralis (VL) muscle was performed and vertical ground reaction force was measurement. The WOMAC questionnaire was administered to all volunteers. For the statistical analysis, was used the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test for comparisons between groups for all variables (p> 0.05). There were no significant differences between groups for kinematic, kinetic and EMG. For the WOMAC, the differences between groups were significant in all three sections (pain: p = 0.001, stiffiness: p = 0.008 and function: p = 0.0005), OAG have the highest values. In adult men with knee OA grade I or II, the stair decent is preserved in the sagittal plane, indicating that at these stages of the disease the functional adaptations linked to the OA are not expressed.