Little is known about how a prior knee injury affects the clinical profile of individuals with knee osteoarthritis (KOA) although this is potentially important to personalize care.
To compare individual and clinical characteristics of individuals with KOA with and without a self-reported prior knee injury.
Secondary data analysis of baseline data from the Good Life with osteoArthritis in Denmark (GLA:D®) registry.
Individuals with symptomatic KOA, self-reporting a prior knee injury requiring a doctor's assessment, were compared to individuals without prior knee injury on a range of individual and clinical characteristics using multivariable logistic regression.
The analysis included 10,973 individuals with KOA of which 54% self-reported a prior knee injury. The average age was 64 years and 73% were female. We found that being male (Odds Ratio (OR): 0.99), having longer symptom duration of knee pain (OR: 1.07), having more painful body sites (OR: 1.03), being able to do more chair rises (OR: 1.02) and being more physically active in a week (2-4 days; OR:1.33) (>4 days; OR: 1.24) were associated with self-reporting a prior knee injury whereas being older (OR: 0.99), having higher BMI (OR: 0.99) and higher quality of life (OR: 0.98) were not associated with reporting a prior knee injury.
The overall pattern of our findings rather than specific characteristics indicates that individuals with KOA and a history of a self-reported knee injury have a somewhat different clinical profile than their non-injured peers.