Wrist arthritis is a disease that involves inflammation of the wrist joint and causes pain and stiffness to the point that simple everyday functions become difficult and painful.
As with other types of arthritis, there is no fundamental treatment for wrist arthritis. However, there are treatment options that can relieve the symptoms of the disease. Other treatment options can slow its progression.
If they receive timely and proper medical advice, many people suffering from wrist arthritis are able to keep the symptoms under control and lead active and relatively normal lives.
The wrist is a complex joint that is actually the intersection of 10 bones:
To help the wrist bones to glide smoothly over each other inside the joint, a healthy bone is covered with a slick cartilage. The cartilage serves as a cushion between the bones as we move our hands and wrists in various ways.
There are two primary kinds of arthritis that affect the wrist – osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. A further kind is post traumatic arthritis.
Osteoarthritis is a wear and tear disease that damages the bones in the wrist and gradually destroys the smooth cartilage that covers the ends of healthy bones. This causes the bones to rub directly against each other, causing the pain and stiffness noted above, as well as long term joint damage. Wrist osteoarthritis tends to appear on one side i.e. either the left or right wrist only.
Rheumatoid arthritis is another common form of wrist arthritis and is an auto immune condition that causes the body’s immune system to malfunction and start attacking the lining of joints (the wrist joint in this case). Most cases of rheumatoid arthritis of the wrist tend to appear simultaneously in both the left and right wrists.
This type of arthritis develops after a traumatic injury to the wrist that either:
Posttraumatic arthritis can develop years after the causative injury and may appear even though the initial injury has received proper treatment.
Although wrist arthritis may be present in a patient, it may not cause symptoms in all cases. In addition, if it is present, the symptoms can vary widely from one patient to another. Even in a particular patient, wrist arthritis symptoms can vary in severity from one day to another.
Having said this, the typical symptoms of arthritis in the wrist (when present) are the following:
If you are experiencing some or all of these symptoms, we suggest that you talk to your doctor with a view to a formal diagnosis being made. As with many other health conditions, early awareness of the presence of wrist arthritis is one of the keys to successfully managing the condition.
To make a formal diagnosis of the cause of a patient’s wrist pain and stiffness, a doctor will likely review the patient’s medical history, looking in particular for previous wrist injuries.
The doctor will also probably ask the patient to describe the symptoms in detail, how they vary over the day and what (if anything) makes the pain worse.
The next likely step will be a physical examination of the patient’s hand and wrist to check for things like loss of range of motion, joint instability or swelling. Finger and thumb mobility, as well as nerve function, will also be evaluated. The goal here will be to eliminate other conditions for which the symptoms may be very similar such as carpal tunnel syndrome (which is caused by damage to the median nerve at the wrist). A distinguishing feature of this condition, however, is that the patient usually has pain, pins and needles and/or other sensory disturbance in the part of the hand corresponding to the area supplied by the median nerve. In addition, there can be wasting of the muscles of that part of the hand as well. This wasting, in turn, can lead to weakness of the grip in that affected hand.
If the doctor is still not fully certain, the following tests may be requested:
As mentioned earlier, there is no fundamental cure for wrist arthritis that will reverse the underlying cause. Since the joint changes are irreversible, the disease cannot be eradicated once it has developed.
However, doctors can suggest a range of measures to reduce the severity of its symptoms and to slow the progression of the condition.
There are both non-surgical and surgical treatment options.
Doctors will initially try to manage wrist arthritis using non-surgical approaches. These may include:
If the conservative treatments described above do not succeed in relieving wrist arthritis symptoms, doctors may then suggest a range of surgical treatments for consideration. The shared goal of surgical treatment options is to eliminate or reduce bone on bone contact within the wrist.
These options may include:
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