Good News For Jimmy Choo

Wearing high heels can pose all sorts of dangers — twisting an ankle or falling out of fashion, to name just two — but new research suggests that increasing a woman's risk of osteoarthritis is not one of them. Among older people, this painful joint disease afflicts the knees of twice as many women as men, and some had speculated that tottering around in high heels played a role. But in a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, researchers found that the rates of osteoarthritis of the knee in a group of 111 women between the ages of 50 and 70 were not affected by their heels, regardless of how often or how high they wore them. Factors that did increase risk included previous knee injury, heavy smoking, osteoarthritis of the feet and, most important, having been overweight (with a BMI of 25 or higher).