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Shi-Ning Ma [1] and Zhan-guo Xie [2] and Yan Guo [3] and Jia-Ni Yu [4] and Juan Lu [1] and Wei Zhang [1] and Li-Juan Wang [1] and Jing Xu [1] and Rui-Li Zhao [1] and Shuai Zhou [1] and Chang-Qing Guo [1]

Academic Editor: Antonella Fioravanti

1, School of Acupuncture-Moxibustion and Tuina, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing 100029, China, bucm.edu.cn

2, The First People’s Hospital of Dongcheng District, Beijing 100075, China

3, First Hospital Affiliated to Tianjin College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin 300193, China

4, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangdong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guangdong 510120, China

Received Mar 16, 2017; Accepted Aug 28, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Knee osteoarthritis (Knee Osteoarthritis KOA) takes pain, stiffness and functional disorder as the main clinical manifestations, and cartilage degeneration as typical pathological change [1]. Often called wear-and-tear arthritis, KOA is a knee joint degenerative disease that affects soft tissues around the knee including the muscle, tendon and joint capsule [2]. According to epidemiological survey, for middle-aged and elderly people in china, the incidence rate of KOA is about 20% [3, 4]. KOA affects nearly 8 million people in the United Kingdom and about 27 million people in the United States [5].

In serious condition, it could lead to joint deformities and even the loss of joint function, thereby affecting patients’ life quality and mobility and it is linked with an excess mortality [6–13]. While genetics, aging, obesity, injury, and biomechanical stress are considered as the main risk factors involved in the pathogenesis of OA, obesity is the primary preventable risk factor for OA [14–18]. Obesity increases the risk of developing OA in both weight-bearing joints (especially the knee) and non-weight-bearing joints (the hand) [15], indicating that obesity-related mechanical and nonmechanical factors increase the risk of OA. In addition, the KOA is more common in women than in men, implying that differences in sex hormones modulate the disease, and the effect of oestrogen replacement therapy may protect against incident of OA in postmenopausal women [19–21].

As a disease of the entire knee joint, KOA...

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