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From the moment you wake up and get out of bed, your hips are on the move. Even when you’re not moving and you’re simply sitting at your desk, these major joints are still in action. The point is that you’ve come to rely on stable hips to get you through your day.
When your hips aren’t functioning well, or worse, they’re in pain, it can have a big impact on your quality of life and your ability to perform everyday activities. It’s little wonder then that you’ve come here to look for answers.
To help you get to the bottom of your hip problems, we turn to the leading hip specialist here at Western Orthopaedics — Dr. Brian White. In the following, Dr. White pulled together some telltale signs of one of the more common hip issues we see at our practice — a hip labral tear.
A great way to kick off this discussion about hip labral tears, which account for between 22% and 55% of hip and groin pain and symptoms, is to quickly review the anatomy of these major joints.
Your hips are ball-and-socket joints in which the ball at the top of your thigh bone — the femoral head— fits into a socket in your pelvic bone called the acetabulum. Your femoral head is covered with cartilage to help it move around inside the acetabulum. To keep the ball portion firmly in the socket, there’s a ring of fibrocartilage called the labrum, which forms a seal around the ball-and-socket to promote stability in your hips.
With a hip labral tear, there’s damage in this strong piece of fibrocartilage, which can lead to symptoms that we discuss below.
There are several different roads to hip labral tears, such as injury and osteoarthritis, but femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) is the most common — about 94% of people with this condition have a hip labral tear. With FAI, there’s extra bone growth that prevents the hip bones from fitting together well.
Now that we’ve reviewed what we’re up against when it comes to hip labral tears, let’s look at some of the hallmarks of this condition, which include pain, stiffness, clicking, and locking.
The most common symptom of a hip labral tear will certainly grab your attention — pain — which you can feel in your hips, in your groin, and even in your buttocks.
This pain can come and go and flare with activity, such as running, walking, and climbing stairs. The discomfort can also become nagging and constant and even affect you at night when you’re trying to sleep. This nighttime pain can be especially acute if you’re lying on the side where there's damage.
Many of our patients describe the pain as one that’s deep in the pelvis and not toward the surface.
Another common sign of a hip labral tear is stiffness in the affected joint that leads to a loss of range of motion. Perhaps you notice you can’t spread one of your legs as wide or you find that moving around is more difficult because your hip feels more rigid.
When there’s damage in your acetabulum, your femoral head may not be gliding inside the socket well. When this happens, you might sense a clicking or popping action in the joint when you use it. Some people also experience locking in the joint as the frayed edges of the acetabulum interfere with movement.
If you’re nodding your head as you read about these symptoms, it’s time to come see Dr. White. Anytime you have pain in your hip, it’s worth investigating so we can get you back to moving around again without pain or discomfort.
To get to the bottom of your hip problems, you can start by contacting one of our offices in Arvada or Denver, Colorado, to set up an appointment with Dr. White.
