Synonyms in a broader sense
Knee pain, knee joint pain, meniscus damage, cruciate ligament rupture, knee arthrosis
Introduction
Knee joint pain can have a variety of causes. They are important in the search for the right diagnosis: Knee pain can be caused by problems with the joint itself or by disease patterns that damage the tissues such as ligaments, tendons or bursae that surround the joint. In any case, knee pain is a very stressful symptom for the person affected, which should be treated as adequately as possible.
The treatment for knee pain always depends on the respective diagnosis.
- Age
- Gender
- Accident event
- Type and quality of pain (sharp, dull etc. )
- Pain development (slow, sudden, etc.
)
- Pain occurrence (at rest, after/with stress)
- Place of pain (inside, outside etc. )
- External aspects (swelling, redness etc. )
- And much more.
Causes
In general, a distinction must be made between whether the knee joint itself is damaged and therefore causes pain, or whether the pain in the knee has another cause, for example due to a previous infection. Pain in the knee joint can have very different causes, some more frequent than others. A few will be presented here.
However, the individual diagnosis must always be made by the treating physician after a detailed examination. One of the most common causes of pain in the knee area is injury and associated damage to the structures. Often the meniscus, the cartilage of the knee joint, is affected.
However, the ligaments in the form of strains or torn ligaments can also be affected. A common sports injury is a torn cruciate ligament (usually the anterior cruciate ligament), or a tear of one of the collateral ligaments. Another important cause of knee pain is inflammation.
Here it is important to distinguish whether the disease is bacterial or non-bacterial.
- If a bacterial infection is present, it is usually accompanied by the usual signs of inflammation. The knee joint is warmed, reddened, swollen, painful and limited in its function.
The infection can also be accompanied by systemic fever.
- Non-bacterial inflammations can be roughly divided into knee joint arthrosis and rheumatism. Rheumatoid inflammatory diseases of the knee joint are caused by the immune system‘s defence against the body’s own tissue. The most common rheumatoid disease is rheumatoid arthritis, which can also affect the knee.
But also ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, lupus erythematosus and some other diseases belong to this type. They all have in common that they destroy the joint and can even attack the bone. Osteoarthritis is a wear and tear condition in which the knee joint is most often affected.
Arthrosis can be divided into primary and secondary. Primary, when the cartilage tissue wears out more easily than in healthy persons due to its nature, or secondary, when the wear and tear is due to mechanical stress or a metabolic cause (pseudo-gout, see chondrocalcinosis). In osteoarthritis, too, cartilage is damaged at first, and as the disease progresses, the bones are attacked.
