Common Causes of Knee Pain

So review of x-rays, what does it look like on an x-ray? When you come to the office we get an extra on every patient to see what the joint looks like. So particular on a knee, this is a normal knee. Here you can see that there’s good space in between the two bones, meaning that the cartilage is there. You can’t see the cartilage on an X Ray, but you can see just the bone. So theoretically, because there’s space here, you can, there’s cartilage now opposed to an arthritic knee where you can see that in this area right here, there’s bone on bone, bone spurs forming. So this is a painful knee end stage arthritis because there’s no cartilage left. So those are the patients that usually are amenable for some type of surgical intervention arthroplasty. Osteoarthritis is one of the most common medical conditions in the United States. Roughly about 27 million Americans suffer from osteoarthritis in some form, knee, hip, back. But those are probably the most common ones that in the general population in the United States that they’re seeking medical care for.

Now, rheumatoid arthritis is less common, but still there’s about 1.5 million people that have rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis is a bit different from osteoarthritis in a sense that the rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease where cells in the body are attacking their own cartilage, causing this destruction of the cartilage. Similar kind of symptoms, but a different disease process.

Post traumatic arthritis is a third type of arthritis that we encounter in the knee and other joints. But post-traumatic arthritis is a patient has had a prior injury to their joint a ligament tear, a fracture to the bone in the supportive bone has collapsed a little bit underneath the cartilage, so there’s damage to, or a traumatic event to the joint kind of propagating or advancing that at a quicker advancing arthritis at a quicker rate. So this is probably the least common of arthritis that we were needing to intervene with surgery for. But still very common. When it comes to arthritis, you know patients, it’s so common that it’s the most common cause of disability in the United States. So 21 million Americans estimated. So then, you know, there’s this picture here, we’re talking not just knees, we’re talking shoulders, elbow, hip, wrist, ankle feet. So it’s common, but we’re talking all different body parts, stages, focusing on the knee.