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Overview of Ankylosing Spondylitis |
Questions about Ankylosing Spondylitis |
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Yes, a diagnosis of this condition can be missed. Anklyosing spondylitis typically causes pain in the lower back (the lumbar spine) and pain in the sacroiliac joints (within the buttocks). However, it can also cause pain and destructive damage as a result of inflammation in other areas such as the middle back (the thoracic spine), and the neck (the cervical spine). Additionally, pain and joint damage may occur in the shoulder joints and in weight-bearing joints such as the hips and knees. Because ankylosing spondylitis involves so many different areas, its effects may be mistakenly assigned to other medical conditions. However, there are other factors that may contribute to a missed diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis: 1. Ankylosing spondylitis tends to appear in younger individuals (those under the age of 30, with a low incidence in individuals over the age of 40) and in three times as many males as females. For this reason, the complaints of pain voiced by patients with AS may be mistakenly attributed to mechanical back pain, or to an unexplained injury. 2. Some of the symptoms of ankylosing spondylitis, such as iritis and spine inflammation, are known to occur in other conditions, such as reiter's syndrome (another member of the spondylarthropathies group, also known as reactive arthritis) and arthritis associated with IBD, or inflammatory bowel disease. 3. While xrays may show the degenerative changes that are brought on by ankylosing spondylitis, in its early stages there may be no such changes to visualize, though the condition will certainly cause pain. 4. Though urinalysis and sedimentation rate testing may point to the presence of ankylosing spondylitis, there is still no single test that can definitively diagnose ankylosing spondylitis. For example, individuals who test positive for the gene HLA-B27 are much more likely to have AS (over 90 percent of those with ankylosing spondylitis have this gene, while a low percentage of the total population has this gene); however, having this particular gene does not equate with an AS diagnosis. Instead, it simply means that a person is significantly more likely to have ankylosing spondylitis. Questions and Information about Ankylosing Spondylitis Social Security Disability Information |
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