If you were asked to consider arthritis you’d probably picture a certain kind of person. You might see an older person or a larger person and while you’d be accurate in your assumption that these people are much more likely to contact the various forms of arthritis, they’re not the only groups who do. It’s rare but children get arthritis too and in them the condition can be much more difficult to see and as such much more difficult to treat before lasting damage is done to their joints.
Children run around a lot and get into bumps and scrapes. The initial symptoms of arthritis are aches and pains in the joints, it can be hard to differentiate the two and very few parents would leap to the conclusion of arthritis if their child complained of a chronic pain. It’d be important to get your child check out by a doctor if he/she continued to complain about pain in the joints when exercise hadn’t just occurred.
In some extreme cases of juvenile arthritis it may be beneficial to give children sufferers a total hip transplant to remove the change of symptoms growing. Obviously this is a large procedure and doctors will have to be absolutely positive it’ll worth before they act on anything at all.
Researchers have recently found that, of the three available, ceramic on ceramic hips are the most effective for children and require by far the least attention in the form of follow up surgeries. The other two options are ceramic on polythene hips or metal hips required much more surgery and as such more much more invasive and potentially damaging to the children.
The scientists involved have said that they’d need a much larger testing group before anything definitive was gleaned from this study but it’s a start and it could go towards helping kids with arthritis live better lives!