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A joint injury is never good news, but damage to your knee can be especially challenging given how much you rely on these large joints to propel you through the world.
Due to their sizable workload, it’s little wonder that knee issues are fairly common. Whether you’re an athlete or age is catching up with your knees, meniscus tears are commonplace with about 850,000 each year in the United States, among people of all ages.
When it comes to sports injuries and knee issues, the team of joint health experts here at Western Orthopaedics has you covered. In this month’s blog post, we’re going to explore meniscus tears so you can start to figure out whether this common issue is behind your knee pain.
Your knees are the largest joints in your body, which is a good thing considering that they enable you to walk, run, jump, and turn. They also support most of your body as you move around.
Involved in these efforts are two pieces of wedge-shaped cartilage in each of your knees called menisci. These soft tissues act as shock absorbers in your knees, transferring the loads from one bone to another. Your menisci also help with rotational stability in your knees as well as overall stability in the joints.
In general, meniscal tears occur in one of two ways:
This means that meniscus tears are as common among younger athletes as they are among the elderly population.
Now let’s get that discomfort in your knee that brought you to this blog — knee pain — one of the hallmarks of a meniscus tear. If you tore your meniscus in an acute injury, you might experience a pop in your knee, but many people can continue to use the joint. Over the following days, however, the symptoms become more pronounced, leaving you with:
If your meniscus tear is gradual, these symptoms will also be gradual, and the longer the issue goes untreated, the more severe the symptoms can become.
If any of the symptoms we describe above sound familiar, your next step is to come see us for a full evaluation. Using digital imaging, we can evaluate the extent of the tear, which greatly informs what we recommend.
One of the challenges with meniscus tears is that much of this soft tissue doesn’t have a good blood supply. If the tear only involves the outside third of your meniscus, this is good news because we refer to this area as the, “red zone,” since it has blood vessels and good access to healing resources.
If the tear reaches the inner two-thirds of the tissue, this isn’t as ideal because it involves what we call the, “white zone,” which, you guessed it, doesn’t have any blood supply. In these cases, we often recommend surgical repair of your meniscus.
But we’re jumping ahead a little bit here. The best step you can make right now is to schedule an appointment with one of our orthopaedic specialists to get to the bottom of your knee pain.
To get started, please contact one of our offices in Arvada or Denver, Colorado.
