The effect of regular exercise program on the pain of the elderly in knee osteoarthritis

Background & Aims: Knee osteoarthritis is one of the most common causes of pain, loss of function and disability in the elderly. Exercise is one of the measures suggested to manage the pain caused by Knee osteoarthritis. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of regular exercise program at home on reducing knee osteoarthritis pain in the elderly. Materials & Methods: In this randomized controlled clinical trial, from the middle of March 2019, for 3 months, 70 elderly people with knee osteoarthritis were randomly selected and randomly assigned to the experimental group under exercise program and the control group under routine treatment programs. The exercise program was implemented twice a day for 4 weeks. For another 4 weeks, the patients did exercise twice a day at home. Before and after the exercise program, the patients were evaluated by the pain subscale of the Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS). The data was analyzed with SPSS version 18 software. Independent t, paired t, chi-square and Fisher's exact tests were used to analyze the data. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05. Results: There was no statistically significant difference between the two experimental and control groups in terms of demographic and clinical variables before the intervention. There was no statistically significant difference in the mean pain score before the intervention in the experimental and control groups (P=0.587). After the intervention and based on the evaluation of data, there was a significant improvement in pain intensity in patients in the experimental group (P = 0.009). Conclusion: The findings showed that the exercise program was effective in reducing the pain of the elderly with knee osteoarthritis. Considering the effectiveness of the introduced exercise in reducing pain, it is recommended to use it as a simple and low-cost measure to train patients with osteoarthritis along with other treatment measures.