Symptoms
The symptoms of elbow arthrosis, i.e. the progressive damage to the articular cartilage in the elbow joint, are manifold and sometimes also present in other diseases.However, pain is almost always present, which is mainly felt during movement and stress and can also occur at rest and at night as the disease progresses. These can also radiate into the shoulder and forearm. In addition, the intensity of pain increases and the duration of the phases in which no pain is felt becomes shorter.
As additional symptoms of elbow arthrosis, one can hear and feel cracking or rubbing noises, called crepitations. Due to the continuous irritation caused by elbow arthrosis in the joint, the surrounding tissue swells and the elbow becomes thick. A typical symptom of elbow arthrosis is the phenomenon that one has initial difficulties in moving the arm fully in the morning or after long breaks.
Other symptoms include muscle tension. Some people notice a slight worsening of the symptoms in cold or wet weather. Overall, elbow arthrosis can thus restrict the freedom of movement of the joint.
Patients can no longer fully extend or bend their arm. The extent to which mobility is reduced by pain, swelling and other symptoms varies from case to case and depends on the degree of elbow arthrosis. In severe cases, the joint can become completely stiff, favored by small detached fragments of cartilage or bone.
Therapy
In the therapy of elbow arthrosis, conservative therapy concepts must be distinguished from surgical approaches. The conservative therapy has the goal to achieve an improvement of the symptoms without surgery and thus to make the joint more mobile and painless or painless again. The advantage of this therapy is that no surgery is required and the associated risks are avoided.
This procedure is recommended for mild to moderately advanced elbow arthrosis. The first pillar of conservative therapy is drug treatment with drugs from the group of so-called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (the best-known example is aspirin). These are substances that on the one hand have a good pain-relieving effect and on the other hand act against inflammatory processes in the joint.
The preparations to be mentioned, which are used in elbow arthrosis, are ibuprofen or diclofenac, which are used in many orthopedic diseases. It is also possible to inject small amounts of cortisone, another anti-inflammatory drug, directly into the joint. Besides medication, the most important measure in the conservative therapy of elbow arthrosis is extensive physiotherapy.
Under professional guidance, various exercises are performed to make the elbow joint more mobile or to keep it mobile (movement therapy). The exercises are done with ligaments, balls, but also under water. Additionally, specific treatments with cold or heat can be applied.
In some cases, however, it is also advisable to immobilize the joint briefly with certain splints (orthoses), especially if a severe inflammation is underway. Surgery of the elbow joint is advisable if the above mentioned measures are not sufficient and show no improvement or if the elbow arthrosis is very advanced. Then, either openly or arthroscopically, i.e. under camera view and through a very small incision, the joint cavity can be freed of free fragments and cartilage and bone can be smoothed.
Finally, there is the possibility of artificially replacing the entire joint by inserting a total elbow prosthesis. In this procedure, a titanium artificial joint is inserted into the humerus and forearm bones under general or partial anesthesia with special cement, whereby the majority of the bones are preserved. Usually this procedure takes about 1-2 hours and the hospital stay is on average one, maximum two weeks.
Following this operation, it is important to have specific physiotherapy, with which most things in everyday life can be managed again after about 6 weeks. However, heavy loads are no longer possible after this.
