At a Glance
- A new study reveals that personalized foot angle adjustments during walking can significantly reduce pain in individuals with medial compartment knee osteoarthritis over one year.
- Participants trained to walk with a specific toe-in or toe-out angle reported greater pain relief than a sham group that continued walking with their natural gait.
- The intervention group successfully decreased their knee adduction moment, a key biomechanical marker for stress on the knee, while the sham group experienced an increase in joint loading.
- Advanced MRI scans suggested this gait modification may also slow the microscopic breakdown of knee cartilage, indicating potential to delay osteoarthritis progression in the long term.
- This non-surgical treatment offers a promising, personalized alternative to pain medications and could help some patients postpone the need for future knee replacement surgery.
A new study suggests that a simple, personalized adjustment to a person’s walking style can significantly reduce pain from knee osteoarthritis and may even slow the progression of the incurable disease. The research, published in The Lancet Rheumatology, offers a promising non-surgical and drug-free treatment for a condition that affects one in seven Americans and is a leading cause of disability. By retraining individuals to walk with a subtle change in their foot angle, scientists have found a way to lessen the damaging stress placed on the knee joint.
The clinical trial, led by researchers from NYU Langone Health, the University of Utah, and Stanford University, involved 68 participants with mild to moderate osteoarthritis in the inner, or medial, part of their knee. Using a specialized gait-assessment laboratory, the team first identified the ideal foot angle—either slightly toe-in or toe-out—that maximally reduced each person’s knee adduction moment, a key measure of stress on the inner knee joint during motion. Half of the participants were then trained over six sessions to adopt this new walking style, while the other half, a control group, continued walking naturally.
After one year, the results were striking. Participants who adjusted their walking pattern reported a 2.5-point reduction in pain on a 10-point scale, an effect comparable to that of over-the-counter pain medications. They also decreased the maximum loading on their knees by 4%. In contrast, the control group experienced a much smaller pain reduction and saw their knee loading increase by over 3%. Advanced MRI scans also revealed that the intervention group experienced less microscopic cartilage breakdown, suggesting that the treatment may help preserve the joint’s structure over time.
“These results highlight the importance of personalizing treatment instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach to osteoarthritis,” said Valentina Mazzoli, Ph.D., study co-lead author and an assistant professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in an NYU Langone Health statement. This personalized gait modification could offer an inexpensive way to manage early-stage osteoarthritis, potentially delaying the need for knee replacement surgery. Researchers hope that emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence that can analyze walking patterns from smartphone videos, will soon make this type of personalized gait analysis widely available in clinics.
References
- NYU Langone Health. (2025, August 12). How small changes in walking technique may help treat knee osteoarthritis. Medical Xpress; NYU Langone Health. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08-small-technique-knee-osteoarthritis.html
- Uhlrich, S. D., Mazzoli, V., Silder, A., Finlay, A. K., Kogan, F., Gold, G. E., Delp, S. L., Beaupre, G. S., & Kolesar, J. A. (2025). Personalised gait retraining for medial compartment knee osteoarthritis: A randomised controlled trial. The Lancet Rheumatology, S2665991325001511. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2665-9913(25)00151-1
