Bad knee pain?

September 19, 2006 11:27 PM

Bad knee pain when squatting/extending the knees.

This has occurred each spring and fall (started about a week ago, prompting this question!) yearly since I was about sixteen. I'm 22 now and I walk/bike a mile or two daily. I am overweight, but I highly doubt heavy enough to have damaged my knees.

The rest of the year, I can squat and run and walk and probably do cartwheels just fine. But when spring or fall rolls around, it'll kill me if I squat down on my knees or keep my knee curled for a not-unreasonable amount of time. It feels like a sudden burst of pain rushing from under the front my kneecap. The burning, aching pain lasts for about 5 to 10 seconds. My knee might stay a bit sore for an hour afterward.

It's not really bothersome (except when I need to squat down, of course) save for in the middle of the night, approximately once every week, I will extend my leg during the normal course of tossing/turning and sudden wake fully, moaning due to the pain under my kneecap.

AskMe is not a replacement for a real doctor's opinion, but I am just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and might know what it is. Also, why does it happen only around certain times of the year? The soonest I can see my doc is when I am home for holidays.

posted by sian to health & fitness (8 answers total)

I suspect that it doesn't correlate with the seasons directly; I suspect it correlates to some activity you undertake which in turn correlates to the seasons.

And I'm afraid I have felt the kind of thing you're talking about intermittently -- and increasingly -- over the years. Like as not the name of your affliction is "growing old".
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:46 PM on September 19, 2006

It's hard to diagnose something like this over the internet, but I had the same type of pain starting around puberty and was diagnosed with a pretty common disease called Osgood-Schlatters. The place under your kneecap where you feel the pain is your tibial tuberosity, and it is the place where the thigh attaches to your tibia - so treatment is pretty much confined to stretching and strengthening exercises. Most teenagers grow out of it, but I was told by my doctor that some people continue to have problems as they get older. To get an accurate diagnosis, though, you'd have to see a doctor because it could be something entirely different.
posted by btkuhn at 12:04 AM on September 20, 2006

Not sure it is your situation, but when I was a teenager I had what was called Patello-femoral Syndrome which caused considerable pain for me in any case where my knees had even the tiniest bit of strain on them. Just climbing stairs was a chore, at one point. My doctor said it was caused by a misaligned kneecap, gave me some exercises to do to line things up properly, and I've not had a problem since.
It was not a seasonal thing, though it did seem to bother me more in cold/wet weather. That could very well have been my imagination.
posted by nightchrome at 12:04 AM on September 20, 2006

Seconding patello-femoral syndrome, especially given the excruciating pain on straightening your knee; my ortho explained it as a misalignment, and recommended exercises to strengthen the inner and outer leg muscles in order to stabilize the knee joint. I'd also recommend a snug neophrene knee brace (any drugstore should have them), if you're not given one when you see the doctor; it is especially helpful when the knee pain is waking you at night.

nightchrome, I also notice the increased pain during cold/wet weather; either send me hunting for the knee braces.
posted by faineant at 12:52 AM on September 20, 2006

Take it really really easy on your knee (invest in a support brace) until you can see a doctor - we almost have the same profile (22 years old, overweight, same pain under the front of the kneecap, walk two miles a day to and from work) and I threw my knee out randomly and really quite badly three and a half months ago.

While doing something innocuous (dancing around in a club, nothing insane), my right leg turned in two different directions, I fell to the floor in agonising pain (worst. pain. evar.), it swelled up with fluid, I couldn't stand or bend the leg. Ended up in the emergency room, 2 weeks off work, on crutches for a month, it stayed swollen for a month and a half, physio for three months and this week I've only just felt like I'm walking without a pronounced limp.

One of the things that they mentioned as a probably cause of this was a misaligned patella (UK healthcare is disgustingly vague, they also thought I knocked the knee completely out of it's joint), and part of my physio was to "pull" the cap back over to the middle. So I'm basically seconding what nightchrome and faineant have said. I just wish I'd gone to a doctor before I injured myself, it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary pain.
posted by saturnine at 3:55 AM on September 20, 2006

Do your knees hurt during movies and long car rides? Supposedly that's another indicator of patello-femoral syndrome. From what I've heard, the injury can be quite patient-specific, so just adopting the exercises/routine of someone diagnosed with patello-femoral syndrome may not help you. Just go to a doctor and get the right exercises for you. My understanding is that it also has to do with some muscles around the knee being stronger than others, and causing a muscle imbalance. This imbalance can be corrected through the right exercises.

I've had this problem for about 15 years (too lazy to do the exercises, and I lost the ones the doc long ago told me to do!), but what I can say is that for me it's strongly linked with whatever exercising I'm doing at the time. I'm not overweight - I don't think it has to be connected - but I injured my knees over-exercising several years ago and have never fixed the problem. I've found it helps a lot if I avoid impact exercise as much as possible - I tend to swim and do the eliptical machine at the gym.
posted by Amizu at 5:56 AM on September 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

I don't know what the cause of your knee pain might be, since you say you don't believe you've ever injured it, but studies show that changes in the barometer do cause pain for some people. This link offers some possible explanations.

http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg18925412.500
posted by La Gata at 7:28 AM on September 20, 2006

My money is on a meniscal tear.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 8:22 AM on September 20, 2006