The factors which affect the cartilage thickness of ankle joint Fei Chang, YunLong Jia, Yao Fu, HanYang Zhang, Zhuan Zhong,QuanYu Dong The Second Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun, China
Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Background Cartilage thickness is critical important for joint Lots of researches about knee joint, but little about the ankle joint cartilage thickness. Biomechanical, physical and chemical properties were different between ankle joint cartilage and knee joint cartilage
Materials and Methods Jan 2011~Aug 2014, 99 patients Inclusion criteria were: Aged between 18 and 60 years; without rheumatoid disease and osteoarthritis; absence of OA, non-athletes, no selfreported chronic pain or significant injury in any ankle. Exclusion criteria were previous ankle surgery, previousinclude ankle operation, deformity; previous ankle and foot fracture. MRI were used to measure the thickness of the ankle joint cartilage.
Results Simple linear regression analysis
Patients whose body height was between 160 and 170 cm were stratified according to gender. Mean body height and mean ankle joint cartilage thickness was significantly greater in males compared to females (P<0.01).
To investigate the influence of gender, the difference between mean ankle joint cartilage thickness in males and females of the same mean body height was compared. There was no significant difference in mean ankle joint cartilage thickness in males and females of the same mean body height.
Discussion A positive linear correlation between body height and ankle joint cartilage thickness in individuals without rheumatoid disease or osteoarthritis. Ankle joint cartilage thickness is determined by natural growth, and depends mainly on an individual s height. Our findings are consistent with observations in the knee joint No relationship between body weight, BMI, and ankle joint cartilage thickness. Ankle joint cartilage thickness has no correlation with age, which is in accordance with previous reports.
Discussion An unexpected finding in the current study is that ankle joint cartilage thickness showed no correlation with gender. This is in contrast to the results of previous research. Shepherd et al. and Sugimoto et al. revealed that cartilage thickness in the ankle joint is greater in males than in females. However, these studies did not control for body height. Our data suggest that the genderdependent difference in the ankle joint cartilage thickness is a function of body height.
Conclusion This study shows that ankle joint cartilage thickness is associated with body height, and that there is no association between ankle joint cartilage thickness and age, body weight, BMI, or gender. As such ankle joint cartilage thickness is unlikely to decrease with aging; therefore, the incidence of ankle osteoarthritis is unlikely to increase with age.
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