1 Joint Diseases Hospitals In St Louis, Missouri

Joint Diseases (click for worldwide facilities list): Joint Disease is any of the diseases or injuries that affect human joints. Arthritis is no doubt the best-known joint disease, but there are also many others. Diseases of the joints may be variously short-lived or exceedingly chronic, agonizingly painful or merely nagging and uncomfortable; they may be confined to one joint or may affect many parts of the skeleton. Treatments vary according to the specific joint disease.

Inflammatory Joint Diseases:

Arthritis, actually a group of conditions involving damage to the joints of the body, is a generic term for inflammatory joint disease. Regardless of the cause, inflammation of the joints may cause pain, stiffness, swelling, and some redness of the skin about the joint.
There are different forms of inflammatory arthritis:

Bursitis is the inflammation of a synovial bursa, the lubricating sac located over a joint or between tendons and muscles or bones. Bursitis may be caused by infection or injury, by arthritis or gout, by calcium deposition along a tendon or joint, or by minor, usually repetitive irritation.
Treatment of bursitis includes rest, heat, mild exercise, and medications that relieve inflammation and remove calcium deposits.

Infectious arthritis, which is sometimes called septic arthritis or pyogenic arthritis, is caused by the spread of a bacterial, viral, or fungal infection through the bloodstream to the joint. It is a serious infection of the joints characterized by pain, fever, occasional chills, inflammation and swelling in one or more joints, and loss of function in the affected joints. It is considered a medical emergency.
Rheumatoid arthritis and allied disorders are chronic diseases that result when, for unknown reasons, the immune system mistakenly attacks the tissue that lines and cushions the joints. As cartilage wears away, the knee often becomes stiff and swollen.

Traumatic arthritis is a form of arthritis that is caused from blunt, penetrating, or repeated trauma or from forced inappropriate motion of a joint or ligament.

Noninflammatory joint diseases often develop from injury and other degenerative disorders such as Osteoarthritis. This is a noninflammatory degenerative joint disease is characterized by the breakdown of the joint's cartilage. Cartilage that cushions the bones of the hip starts to erode, eventually allowing the bones to grind or rub together and causing hip pain and stiffness. The exact cause of osteoarthritis is unknown. br>
Secondary joint diseases include hemorrhagic joint diseases, aseptic necrosis, endocrine factors, neurogenic arthropathy, hypertrophic osteoarthropathy, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and tumours of the joints.

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