What causes knee pain in children and teenagers?

Younger children, roughly 3 to 10 years

• Growing pains: evening aches in both legs, gone by morning
• Bumps and minor injuries from play
• Irritable hip or Perthes disease, which may be felt in the knee
• Discoid meniscus: an unusually shaped meniscus that can click or block straightening
• Less often: joint infection or juvenile idiopathic arthritis, which causes swelling and morning stiffness

Pre-teens and teenagers

• Osgood-Schlatter disease: a painful bump below the kneecap in active children during growth spurts
• Sinding-Larsen-Johansson syndrome: pain at the lower edge of the kneecap
• Patellofemoral pain: an ache around the kneecap with stairs, squats or long sitting, common in teenage girls
• Kneecap instability: the kneecap slips or dislocates, often with a twist
• Osteochondritis dissecans: a patch of bone and cartilage that loses its blood supply
• Sports injuries: meniscus tears and ACL tears, increasingly seen in teenagers
• Slipped upper femoral growth plate: a hip problem in growing teenagers that often presents as knee pain
• Plica syndrome, or patellar tendon pain in jumping sports

Rare but important causes

Infection of the bone or joint, inflammatory arthritis, and very rarely bone tumours can cause knee pain in children. Clues are fever, weight loss, a hot swollen joint, pain at rest or at night that keeps worsening, or a hard lump. These are uncommon, but they are the reason persistent or unusual pain should always be examined rather than assumed to be growing pains.

Finding the cause in Doha

Where exactly it hurts, what makes it worse, whether there was an injury and how the child walks usually point to the diagnosis. At Aman Hospital Dr. Gelber examines both knees and hips, then decides whether an X-ray, MRI or blood test will help. Most causes in children are treated without surgery.