Functional difficulty

The limitation of certain movements depends very much on the pain. Your joints are sensitive and lack flexibility. The ease and scope of your movements have diminished. All these changes make your movements painful and everyday tasks more difficult to accomplish. This is the case, for example, for opening a jar of mayonnaise or going upstairs. Indeed the functional difficulty corresponds to the limitation of the mobility of the joint affected by osteoarthritis.

It varies according to the person’s activity. Hence a golf player will have far more difficulty with knee osteoarthritis than someone who does not practice a sport. In the same way a violinist will be very handicapped by osteoarthritis of the fingers, even if only slight.

As a rule, joints affected by osteoarthritis are neither red nor warm. They may be swollen when liquid becomes installed (synovial effusion), which is particularly frequent in the knees.

At a later stage you may notice the presence of little lumps or nodules, especially on the fingers and toes. Eventually these bony nodules or osteophytes provoke a deformation of the joints which is particularly noticeable on the hands and knees. The overall condition is still good. There is no fever or weight loss.

However, osteoarthritis lesions are irreversible and, besides the deformation, may lead to joint stiffness that evolves towards partial lameness. Only an affected knee or hip leads to significant disablement, assessed by the walking test and the Lequesne Hip or Knee Score.

The following signs: clicking of a joint, a joint giving way, the sensation of an obstruction and pseudo-locking are of no relevance to the diagnosis. But they can be very painful.