Wide high heels not safer says research

Women wearing wide high heels are not necessarily better shod than those sporting stilettos, recent research has showed.

A study in the Lancet medical journal showed that women wearing shoes with high but broad heels were even more likely to develop knee arthritis than those who wore stiletto-style, narrow-heeled footwear.

"Both types of shoes exaggerated the normal varus torque [joint pressure] at the knee by 26 per cent and 22 per cent for the wide-heeled and narrow-heeled shoes respectively," US researchers at the Harvard Medical School and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital said.

"These findings may have particular importance with respect to the development of knee osteoarthritis, insofar as women tend to wear these wide-heeled dress shoes routinely and for longer periods of time," their report added.

But stiletto wearers were still more at risk from falls, ankle injuries and foot deformities.

The study was based on analysing 20 healthy women of similar height walking in a pair of wide-based and a pair of narrow-based shoes, all around seven centimetres high.

- REUTERS