Benign joint hypermobility, or benign joint hypermobility syndrome, is a pathology that is widespread in the population. Benign joint hypermobility syndrome is a connective tissue disorder with hypermobility in which musculoskeletal symptoms occur in the absence of systemic rheumatologic disease. Typically, patients with benign joint hypermobility syndrome at the young age complain of volatile joint pain, are under the supervision of a physician or rheumatologist with different diagnoses, but different imaging methods, including joint MRI, do not find pronounced articular pathology. At the same time, when they reach senile age, changes in the joints of such patients progress rapidly enough, which are radiographically manifested by the phenomena of osteoarthritis. Taking into account the greater propensity for rapid progression of osteoarthritis in patients with benign joint hypermobility syndrome, it is necessary to determine changes in the meniscus of the knee joints at the preclinical stage of osteoarthritis development. One of the instrumental methods that can help in this case is shear wave elastometry. Ultrasound elastometry was used as a method of evaluating the stiffness of soft tissues, particularly abdominal tissues in which neoplastic or global organ diseases alter composition and increased stiffness. Elastometry may be an ideal tool to assess loss of stiffness in tissues such as diseased or damaged cartilage and damaged knee meniscus. The purpose of the study was to determine the differences in knee meniscus density in patients depending on the presence of benign joint hypermobility syndrome. Material and methods. We examined 92 patients (42 women and 50 men) with a mean age of 39.7 ± 6.32 years with benign joint hypermobility syndrome and a control group of 43 individuals with an average age of 41.3 ± 4.32 years without signs of benign joint hypermobility syndrome. After examinations, we calculated the average elasticity for the anterior and posterior horns of the medial and lateral meniscuses, the average maximum and minimum values, depending on the patient's benign joint hypermobility syndrome. Results and discussion. The obtained data allowed us to conclude that there was a significant difference in the elasticity of the meniscus in patients with benign joint hypermobility syndrome and almost healthy patients. When conducting the correlation analysis, we found a strong inverse relationship between the number of points obtained by patients in the study on the Beiton scale and the elasticity index of the meniscus tissue (r = 0.75; p = 0.012). Conclusion. Thus, patients with benign joint hypermobility syndrome had a lower elasticity of the meniscus of the knee joints compared to the control group. At the same time, lower elasticity of the meniscus of the knee joints in patients with benign joint hypermobility syndrome may change in the course of development of pathological changes, which requires further studies.
Keywords: benign joint hypermobility syndrome, meniscus, ultrasound diagnostics, shear-wave elastometry
Full text: PDF (Ukr) 184K