What are the common causes of knee pain?
Dr Andrew Dutton explains some of the reasons why individuals experience knee pain
In the elderly it's usually arthritis, Dr Dutton says. “Arthritis is essentially damage to the cartilage, which is the covering of the bone, and that causes friction and pain and swelling.”
In the younger patient, one cause can be from an overuse-type injury. Those that do a lot of marathon running or similar sports; they can get overuse-type injuries of tendons, like the patella or the kneecap tendon. There's also a muscle on the outer aspect of the knee called the iliotibial band and this can cause friction or rubbing on the outside of the bone leading to pain. I have also seen a few stress injuries, which is like a hairline fracture due to repetitive loading of the knee, so they're the main overuse-type injuries.
There are also the acute-type injuries, such as tears of the ligaments. There's two side ligaments that can be torn around the knee, especially the inside ligament, and then there's the cross ligaments or the cruciate ligaments, which are within the centre of the knee and usually injured by a rotary force (or a torsion force).
Lastly you can injure the meniscus – the meniscus is like a cushion, a cartilaginous cushion in the knee and an injury there is often due to a twisting injury.
Dr Andrew Quoc Dutton is a USA fellowship-trained consultant orthopaedic surgeon with subspecialty interests in keyhole and sports surgery, knee and hip replacements, cartilage regeneration and stem cell therapeutics in orthopaedics. He is in private practice at SMG Orthopaedics and can be contacted at +65 6887 5000.
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