Clinical Inquiry: Does knuckle popping lead to arthritis?
One article on PainSci cites Powers 2016: The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Habitual knuckle popping, or cracking (over the course of several decades) isn't associated with clinical or radiographic evidence of osteoarthritis.
related content
- “The consequences of habitual knuckle cracking,” R L Swezey and S E Swezey, West J Med, 1975.
- “Effect of habitual knuckle cracking on hand function,” J Castellanos and D Axelrod, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 1990.
- “Habitual knuckle cracking and hand function,” P A Simkin, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 1990.
- “Does knuckle cracking lead to arthritis of the fingers?,” D L Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, 1998.
- “Knuckle cracking and hand osteoarthritis,” Kevin Deweber, Mariusz Olszewski, and Rebecca Ortolano, J Am Board Fam Med, 2011.
- “"Knuckle Cracking": Can Blinded Observers Detect Changes with Physical Examination and Sonography?,” Robert D Boutin, Anuj P Netto, David Nakamura, Cyrus Bateni, Robert M Szabo, Michael Cronan, Brent Foster, William R Barfield, J Anthony Seibert, and Abhijit J Chaudhari, Clinical Orthopaedics & Related Research, 2017.
- “Effects of habitual knuckle cracking on metacarpal cartilage thickness and grip strength,” M T Yildizgören, T Ekiz, S Nizamogullari, A D Turhanoglu, H Guler, N Ustun, M Kara, and L Özçakar, Hand Surg Rehabil, 2017.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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- Association of Lumbar MRI Findings with Current and Future Back Pain in a Population-based Cohort Study. Kasch 2022 Spine (Phila Pa 1976).
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