How to Prevent Hemophilia Joint Disease with Activity and Nutrition

Medical Video: Joint function in haemophilia

Hemophilia can cause joint disease such as bleeding in the joints. Bleeding in the knee, elbow, or other joint is another common form of internal bleeding in people who have hemophilia. This bleeding can occur without a clear injury.

At first, bleeding causes tightness in the joint without any real pain or signs of bleeding. the joint then becomes swollen, hot to the touch, and painful to bend. Swelling continues to occur along with bleeding. Finally, the movement in the temporary joint is limited. Pain can be more painful. Joint bleeding that is not treated quickly can damage the joints. Therefore, to prevent these symptoms, we promote good physical activity and nutrition for patients with hemophilia.

Physical activity

Physical activity is beneficial for everyone. Healthy exercise and exercise for both children and adults with hemophilia. Physical fitness and muscle strength is an important foundation of our approach to our attention, because good muscle development provides better support for the joints, better protection from everyday clothes and better recovery after joint bleeding. Regular exercise has even been shown to reduce the amount of spontaneous bleeding (bleeding that is not caused by injury).

Continue to exercise well several times per week in a fitness center or at home to help maintain a range of motion and flexibility. Early mobilization after joint bleeding is also useful to avoid joint stiffness and joint freezing.

In addition, improving physical fitness has many more positive effects on our lives such as:

Increases bone strength and bone-related parts
Increase social contact
Develop self-reliance and self-esteem
Energy increases
Improve performance in school and professional life
Decrease in body weight and risk of obesity
Prevent depression and anxiety
Reduces the risk of heart attack, stroke and diabetes

However, as a patient with hemophilia you must think ahead and prepare yourself for exercise!

General rules for physical activity:

Avoid isolated muscle exercises with heavy loads. They will place excessive pressure on your joints. Use elastic resistance bands instead.
Avoid risky sports such as soccer, motorized biking, boxing and the like. Challenging the freezing system with trauma and injury may not be safe and put your life at unnecessary risk.
If you are a prophylactic patient: if you exercise for times a day to relieve your prophylaxis regularly in the morning to protect you during the day. If you exercise at night, set prophylactic time for the evening to provide maximum protection afterwards. Try to coordinate your gym with a factor infusion.
If you are a patient who can ask: try asking for additional doses before exercise.

Food

It is very important that patients with hemophilia keep their weight under control, because being overweight and obesity will affect joint health. Being overweight can have an impact on the weight of the joints and can increase joint pain. During walking, the knee and ankle joints - usually affected by hemophilia bleeding - need to bear about 5 times a person's total body weight. For every pound of excess weight, about 2.5 kg of extra body weight is added to each joint. Conversely, 5 kg of body weight will reduce about 25 kg of additional stress from each joint.

To find out if you are above the recommended normal weight, use the body mass index (BMI) calculator. Body mass index is a composite score that considers height and weight to assess body fat and categorizes you as normal, overweight or obese.

In order to reduce or maintain your weight, the United States Department of Agriculture recommends eating a diet rich in grains, fruits and vegetables, and low in fat, adding sugar and salt (sodium).

Dietary supplements

As a hemophilia patient you must be very careful about diet supplements, because many supplements can increase bleeding or blood clotting tendencies, such as aspirin or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (for example, Motrin®, Exedrin®, or Alleve®). Discuss supplements or pain pills on the market with your hemophilia doctor.

Here are some supplements that you might need to avoid after considering the benefits of the risk of bleeding with your hemophilia doctor: