Symptoms of Juvenile Ankylosing Spondylitis

How much do you know about the symptoms of ankylosing spondylitis in children? In fact, we still need to know a lot about this disease. Many children will suffer from this disease. If we don’t know the symptoms at the beginning, it is easy to neglect treatment and delay the disease. We should learn about the specific clinical manifestations of juvenile ankylosing spondylitis. So what are the clinical symptoms?

Juvenile ankylosing spondylitis (JAS) refers to a connective tissue disease that begins before the age of 16 and is characterized by chronic inflammation of the sacroiliac and spinal joints. It is a typical spondyloarthritis, with the peak incidence in young and middle-aged people. However, some cases often develop in some latent form in childhood. Therefore, juvenile ankylosing spondylitis (JAS) is often misdiagnosed as juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA) at the beginning of the disease. Patients with lower limb arthritis as the main manifestation are often misdiagnosed as JRA oligoarticular type II. Typical JAS will gradually manifest as pain in the waist, buttocks, and sacrum, and inflammation at the tendon attachment site. MRI can detect sacroiliitis early.

JAS often begins with recurring pain in the lower back, buttocks, groin, hips, etc. These early symptoms may be ignored and misdiagnosed for a long time until more specific symptoms appear and cause concern. If the child develops the disease in the large joints of the lower limbs, the symptoms are similar to oligoarthritis type II JRA, and more attention should be paid to the diagnosis of early cases of JAS. Sacroiliitis is the key condition for the clear diagnosis of JAS.

In the early stage of JAS, it may be found that the lumbar lordosis caused by lumbosacral joint disease disappears, limiting the forward bending of the lower spine (positive Schober sign). If there is a costovertebral joint disease, the chest expansion will be reduced. About half of JAS cases do not meet the diagnostic criteria in the early stages, and nearly half of the patients have only one attack. About 18% of patients have a relatively long pathological course, and most people can retain intact joint function.

The above is an introduction to the symptoms of juvenile ankylosing spondylitis. Through in-depth understanding of such symptoms, many people hope to have some good methods of treatment. In particular, many people hope that by understanding the symptoms, they should seek medical diagnosis and treatment in time if they discover them in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to know more about the symptoms of juvenile ankylosing spondylitis.