Causes of knee pain
Throughout life, the joints of the legs are under enormous stress, since they are responsible for a person's ability to move around painlessly, stand, play sports or work. However, some diseases and pathological conditions can cause severe pain and immobilize joints for some time, or forever. Therefore, it is so important to timely diagnose the causes of knee pain and prevent the development of pathology or serious complications.
Types of knee pain
The occurrence of pain in the knee joint is due to the defeat of the connective and soft tissues. This is due to injuries, their complications, as well as due to chronic and some other diseases.
The first sensations of discomfort appear when an excess of inflammatory, intra-articular fluid, or blood with hemarthrosis, begins to squeeze the nerve endings that penetrate the tissues of the joint. When diagnosing pain syndrome, the following features are taken into account:
- Sudden pain is a clear sign of fresh injury or damage to the meniscus. It also occurs when acute bone growth is introduced into the tissue;
- Shooting pain - occurs when the inflammatory process affects the nerve endings, as well as at one of the last stages of arthrosis;
- Pulsating pain - occurs with rheumatoid arthritis, thrombophlebitis and acute inflammation of soft tissues;
- Aching pain - speaks of the course of chronic processes in the joint. The causes of aching knee pain are inflammation and the initial stages of arthrosis, as well as the manifestation of meteorological dependence in case of disorders in the vascular system;
- Pulling pain - observed with various pathologies of the knee joint at certain stages of development;
- Cutting pain when trying to move - caused by a ruptured meniscus or pinched nerve, and not only in the knee itself, but also in the spine;
- Constant pain - occurs with spasm of nearby muscles, capsule fibrosis, reactive synovitis and neuropathies.
Causes of Acute Knee Pain
Joint injury is the most common cause of acute knee pain. The consequences of an unsuccessful jump or strike are usually very obvious, but it is not always possible to understand which part of the joint is damaged. To choose the right treatment, you need the right diagnosis. There are the following possible options for knee injury:
- Sprained or torn ligaments. Usually accompanied by severe sudden pain and a characteristic crackle when the fibers are damaged, and there is also a feeling of dislocation of the limb. If the injury is severe enough, joint instability may occur;
- Fractures of the thigh and patella bones. In this case, the cause of knee pain is soft tissue injury due to deformation and unnatural position of the limb;
- Damage to the meniscus. Sharp painful sensations disappear in a few seconds after trauma, but after 10-20 minutes, when the local shock passes, the unpleasant pain in the joint becomes aching, since the vessels are affected, and bursting due to the developing synovitis. Sometimes, when the cartilage breaks, a blockage appears: the torn part of the meniscus is pinched between the bones, which causes sharp pain with any attempt to move.
Causes of knee joint pain
Very often, the cause of aching knee pain is inflammatory diseases that occur in acute or chronic form. The main diseases of the knee joints of this origin include:
- Arthritis is a group of inflammatory diseases with similar symptoms, but of different origins: lipoarthritis, gout, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. Typical signs are local fever and redness, joint swelling, and knee pain, aggravated by movement;
- Bursitis - lesions of the tendon or joint capsule. They are accompanied by constant pain, which is pronounced and does not depend on physical activity. Bursitis occurs when the capsule stretches under the action of pus and presses on the nerve endings;
- Becker's cyst - with the active stage, pain appears in the popliteal region, spreading along the calf muscle to the sole and preventing the joint from flexing;
- Tendinitis is inflammation of the tendons and ligaments characterized by visible swelling and discomfort in a specific area. When bending and extending the knees, as well as muscle contraction, sensitivity increases, and the pain radiates to the muscles of the thigh and lower leg.
Other causes of pain in the knee joints are non-inflammatory diseases such as tendopathies, meniscopathy and chondropathy. With these pathologies, as a rule, one type of connective tissue is affected - the meniscus, cartilage, ligaments or tendons. Such dystrophic diseases are characterized by pain in the knees when walking, bending and extending the limb, crunching in the joint, and sometimes involuntary limb bowing.
Knee pain caused by poor circulation
About 5-10% of all knee pains are vascular, which are caused by impaired blood circulation. They usually occur during a period of active growth, coinciding with adolescence, and are associated with the fact that blood vessels do not always have time to grow due to the accelerated development of bones.
Such pains sometimes pursue a person throughout life, but their intensity usually decreases after 18-20 years. This sharply distinguishes them from arthrosis, which increases with age and causes a decrease in joint mobility.
The onset of pain is usually associated with a change in the weather, colds or physical exertion.
If the cause of knee pain is established and it is a violation of blood circulation, massage, warming ointments or vasodilators are prescribed. Special therapy for such conditions is not required.
With a sharp violation of blood circulation, aseptic necrosis of the bones of the knee joint occurs, which is accompanied by severe pain, and the death of hard tissues itself occurs very quickly - in just a few days.
Other causes of knee pain
Sometimes the cause of knee pain is not injuries or pathologies occurring in the joints, but general diseases in which painful sensations in the described area are one of the characteristic signs. The most common ones are:
- Rheumatism;
- Gout;
- Osteomyelitis;
- Flat feet;
- Systemic lupus erythematosus;
- Oncological diseases;
- Arthrosis of the hip joint.
The elderly (general aging of the body), women (a tendency to rupture of the anterior cruciate ligaments), adolescents (predisposition to Osgood-Schlatter disease) and those who are overweight (overload and damage to the joints) are also at risk of knee pain. …
Whatever the cause, knee pain should alert you and make you take action. Before the final diagnosis is made, it is dangerous to self-medicate, since the therapy is selected individually, and the methods of healing for different types of lesions can be exactly the opposite.
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