Arthrosis - Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment

• Flekosteel
• Articles
• Arthrosis

26 April 2025

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Everything you need to know about arthrosis - the causes, signs, varieties, and diagnostic methods - will help detect the disease in the early stages. And effective treatment methods will allow you to get rid of this disease. Arthrosis is a characteristic of people over 40 years. However, impartistic statistics show that in recent decades the tendency to rejuvenate men and women aged 30-35 years has begun to suffer.

What is arthrosis?

Arthrosis is a chronic joint disease accompanied by pathological changes in hyaline cartilage, and then in adjacent tissue, joint capsules and synovial shells. The defeat is dystrophy and degenerative, which leads to changes in the structure of articular tissue, loss of their functionality. In accordance with the same statistical data, arthrosis is subject to 12% of the total planet's population. From 62% to 65% of all episodes of this disease over 60 years. 30-35% of joint damage in this pathology is in patients aged 40-60 years. And about 3% are young people aged 20-40.

The dangers of joint disease are manifested by the fact that practically it is not fully healed. Although when diagnosing pathology in the initial phase of development, it helps preserve joint functionality.

Most often, cases of arthrosis lesions in the joints are diagnosed:

• Karpal joints;
• lumbar spine and lumbar;
• knee joint;
• hip joint;
• shoulder joint;
• ankle joints;
• Metatarsophalangeal joint.

This disease is more characteristic of female population - Representatives of half the population of women suffer from this pathology are more often at an older age. Arthrosis from interface joints occurs in women 10 times more often than male populations.

Possible consequences of arthrosis

With timely treatment, this disease is manifested by less developmental intensity and, as a result, stops degenerative and dystrophy changes. This means that timely surgical or therapeutic intervention allows you to maintain joint functionality, normal walking force and relieve pain.

At the same time, tightening with treatment causes frequent and stable pain, inequality, joint swelling. Progressive pathological changes in tissue eliminate the usual functionality. In a short time, in the absence of competent treatment, arthrosis quickly flows to a chronic form. Such consequences raise the need for constant medical observation and routine treatment of disease during the exacerbation period.

To avoid the consequences and complications with the first suspicion of its development, you must contact a medical specialist. In the early phase of the development of the treatment of arthrosis joint, a rheumatologist was involved in treatment. In chronic form, this pathologist treatment is carried out by orthopedic traumatic experts.

Arthrosis type

This joint pathology has several different forms and varieties in such criteria:

• causes (primary and secondary forms);
• Arthrosis stages (three stages of development are classified);
• Pathology Localization (Place of Disease and Joint Types);
• Localization form (general and local form);
• The course of the disease (acute or chronic).

In the place of manifestation of symptoms, hips, knees, cystic, elbows, shoulders, ankle, cervical arthrosis is distinguished.

According to etiological signs, primary pathology is classified, developing in themselves without prerequisites, and secondary diseases. In the last case, damage to the joints occurs due to the development of infectious diseases in adjacent tissue, mechanical disorders, loss of physiological functionality of the joint, as well as a result of the progressive inflammatory process, hypothermia, injury or other factors.

Classification in the form of localization involves local and general damage to the connection. In the first case, the disease and symptoms include a small portion of the joints or individual tissue and components. With a general form, some connections are affected or one of them with the full scope of all connecting networks.

At various stages of disease development, the intensity levels that vary are manifested. At the same time, symptoms and complications can be expressed brighter, more or less dynamically leaking the process of fabric destruction and disorders of joint functionality.

Depending on the journey of arthrosis, they distinguish:

• acute form;
• chronic form.

The acute form is usually manifested by an increase in the intensity of the development of symptoms and its severity. Painful sensations appear stronger, and morphological changes in tissue run more dynamically. In chronic form, the course of the disease slowly, it is manifested by separate signs during the exacerbation period and practically cannot be cured.

Disease level

During this disease, drugs distinguish three stages that have differences in signs of disease, the intensity of damage and localization. At the same time, distinguish the three stages related to the type of fabric that experiences pathological changes.

1. The first level of the development of joint arthrosis is the initial phase of the disease. This is marked by a little cartilage tissue lesion and the loss of physiological function in collagen fibers. At the same time, at the first stage, minor morphological disorders of bone tissue and structural changes in synovial fluid are recorded. Joint cartilage is covered with cracks, the patient has a little pain in the pathology localization.
2. The second level is the development of arthrosis with an increase in dynamics. This stage is marked by the appearance of stable pain, kroma. Morphological and dystrophic cartridges are important noted, during the diagnosis, bone growth is revealed. Osteofit is formed - Bone growth is seen during visual examination of the location of destruction. At the same time, the process of degenerative changes in synovial capsules occurs, which leads to its structural thinning. Diseases in this phase can often worsen and become regular. The pain gradually becomes constant.
3. The third level is active development. At this stage, synovial fluid is almost absolutely no because of degeneration, and bone tissue suddenly -arriving with each other. Joint mobility is almost absent at all, the pain becomes more real. Cartilage tissue is also not there due to degenerative and atrophy changes. The third level treatment of joint arthrosis is considered impractical.

In addition to the three degrees of this pathology development, there is a final stage - the destruction of all joint networks that cannot be canceled. In this phase, it is not possible not only to do productive therapy, but even to eliminate pain syndrome.

The inflammatory process usually begins with a second level damage level, in rare cases, in the absence of medical intervention - in the first stage. Furthermore, it becomes more difficult to stop it, and this can cause secondary pathology, the development of pathogenic microflora at the location of disease localization.

To exclude serious consequences, treatment must start from the first level, and the use of intensive care methods. In the last stage associated with the total destruction of cartilage tissue, only one methodology for driving patients from pain and joint immobility permitted - Endoprosthetics with a complete or partial joint component replacement.

Causes of disease

The reason may be a primary and secondary factor. In the elderly, this disease can occur with mixed etiology, namely, with the primary and secondary causes. Their complex manifestations worsen the course of arthrosis and reduce the dynamics of recovery.

The main cause of most of these types of pathology is metabolic violations. Changing the metabolic process causes morphological abnormalities in cartilage and synovial fluids. As a result, changes are related to all joints, and are often accompanied by the origin of local focus.

In addition to metabolic pathology, the causes of joint arthrosis are:

• Traumatic damage to individual or all joints. This includes dislocation, broken bones, ligaments, meniscus rupture, wounds that penetrate. This reason is more common to people involved in sports, or whose activities are related to dangerous working conditions and physical activity;
• The inflammatory process is a factor that often acts as a secondary reason. Inflammation usually develops in patients suffering from gout, psoriasis, rheumatic disorders, autoimmune pathology. Joints are subject to patients at the exacerbation stage of infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, chlamydia, staphylococcus and other infectious diseases;
• Consequences of the form of breathing disease - flu, acute respiratory virus infections, acute respiratory infections;
• Increasing the patient's body weight - with disproportionate burden on their tissue joints, suffering from a constant mechanical effect, which leads to morphological deviations and destruction of cartilage structures;
• Excessive hypothermia that leads to the destruction of the integrity of cartilage tissue and the loss of synovial fluid structure;
• Thyroid disease.

Separate places in the etiology of arthrosis are genetic factors. This is a genetic anomaly that is able to provoke joint tissue dysplasia and disruption of the physiological function of collagen fiber, which is responsible for flexibility and joint mobility.

At the same time, other factors are the reasons for the development of this pathology: deficiency of vitamins, poisoning due to quality products or excessive drugs, the patient's elderly, the pathological process of blood formation and blood flow, hormone abnormalities, and diseases of the infectious blood reproduction system.

Mechanism of disease development

When one of the causes that provoke joint disease with arthrosis arises, the pathological process begins to develop in it. The mechanism of their development is not fully studied, but the main stage of medicine is officially known.

In the early stages, the structure of cartilage tissue and abnormal changes in synovial fluids occur. All of this is the result of a violation of the metabolic process in which the combined network does not accept the components needed in sufficient quantities, or lose some of them.

Furthermore, the elasticity of collagen fiber and cartilage flexibility is lost, due to the fact that in the body, with lack of nutrition, hyaluronic acid has no time to be produced, which provides softness and flexibility of structural composition of collagenic fibers. The cartilage gradually dries, becomes fragile and cracked. The liquid in the synovial capsule gradually runs out and then really disappears.

In cartilage, roughness, solid bone neoplasm is formed. At the same time, other joint tissue deformation develops, pathological degeneration, dystrophy and loss of physiological activity.

For patients, this change means the appearance of pain, inequality, and joint immobility.

Symptoms of arthrosis

Signs of joint arthrosis arise from the first level, although sometimes they are not very clear. Characteristic phenomena for all stages of arthrosis are:

• pain syndrome;
• crispy sound when moving;
• inactive or total decline in joint mobility;
• swelling;
• Joint conformation.

Painful

Pain usually occurs during movement. With intense physical activity, painful sensations intensify and obtain persistent trends. With all types of arthrosis, their localization, the pain is sharp.

In the initial phase, pain is expressed weakly, more often they appear during the day. Usually the pain is short and subsides at rest. In chronic form and with intensive development of the form of acute pain, pain syndrome manifesters itself more often, has an increase in manifestation periods, often disturbing even at night resting.