Common symptoms of tendon and ligament tears are pain and swelling. You may also hear or feel a pop when you tear the tissue. Treatments can include a brace, medicine, or surgical repair. Tendon and ligament tears and ruptures can affect many joints in the body, but our knees often take the brunt of these injuries.
Football and basketball players tend to be at a higher risk for ACL tears, but they can happen to anyone at any time. Meniscus tears have two common causes — a traumatic injury to the knee or the process of degeneration.
They often occur from twisting a bent knee joint. If you tear or rupture a tendon or ligament, you should seek medical attention as soon as possible. This will allow your doctor to assess the severity of the injury prior to swelling, which makes it harder to diagnose.
Off all the possible tendon and ligament injuries that can occur, the two most common are tears to the anterior cruciate ligament ACL and meniscus in the knee. Other symptoms of an ACL tear include:.
Some symptoms of a meniscus tear include:. You should see a doctor immediately after tearing or rupturing a tendon or ligament. Swelling can affect the diagnosis of your injury. Warm up before you exercise, and do some gentle stretching afterward. After the activity, apply ice to prevent pain and swelling. If these steps don't help, your doctor may suggest physical therapy. If the injury is severe or long-lasting, your doctor may have you use a splint, brace , or cast to hold the tendon still.
It may take weeks or months for a tendon injury to heal. Be patient, and stay with your treatment. If you start using the injured tendon too soon, it can lead to more damage.
To keep from hurting your tendon again, you may need to make some long-term changes to your activities. The joint areas most commonly affected by tendinopathy are the shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle. Sometimes tendon pain is caused by inflammation around calcium crystals in or around the tendon calcific tendinitis.
The cause of the deposits often isn't known. These crystal deposits can be quite painful and can become a chronic problem.
Symptoms of tendinopathy may be similar to those of inflammation of the bursa bursitis. For more information, see the topic Bursitis. To diagnose a tendon injury also known as tendinopathy , your doctor will review your medical history and daily activities and conduct a physical exam to check your overall health, areas of pain and tenderness, and range of motion and strength. Your exam may also include checking your nerve function feeling and reflexes and blood circulation pulses.
If your symptoms are related to use of a tool or sports equipment, your doctor may want you to demonstrate how you use it. If your medical history and physical exam point to a tendon injury, you will probably not need more testing. If your symptoms are severe or have not improved with treatment, more tests may be helpful.
These may include:. Initial treatment for a tendon injury tendinopathy typically includes rest and pain relievers. Acetaminophen can reduce pain. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs NSAIDs can reduce both the pain and inflammation you might have from a tendon injury. The goals of this early treatment are to:. If you are still having pain, stiffness, and weakness after initial treatment, your doctor may recommend some type of physical therapy.
Also, you may need to make long-term changes in the type of activities you do or how you do them to prevent your tendinopathy from returning. The goals of ongoing treatment are to:.
Medical researchers continue to study new ways to treat tendon injuries. Talk to your doctor if you are interested in experimental treatments. Some of the treatments being studied include:. Arthroscopic surgery or open surgery using one larger incision is sometimes used to treat calcific tendinitis that has not responded to nonsurgical treatment and is causing pain.
You can help prevent a tendon injury also known as tendinopathy from developing or recurring by taking steps at home, work, and during activities to promote healing and protect your tendons.
Blahd Jr. Author: Healthwise Staff. Medical Review: William H. This information does not replace the advice of a doctor. Healthwise, Incorporated, disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Your use of this information means that you agree to the Terms of Use. Learn how we develop our content. To learn more about Healthwise, visit Healthwise. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.
Updated visitor guidelines. You are here Home » Tendon Injury Tendinopathy. Top of the page. Topic Overview Is this topic for you? Pain may increase with activity. Symptoms of tendon injury may affect the precise area where the injured tendon is located or may radiate out from the joint area, unlike arthritis pain, which tends to be confined to the joint.
Crepitus, or a crunchy sound or feeling when the tendon is used. This is usually uncomfortable or painful. Pain and stiffness that may be worse during the night or when getting up in the morning. Stiffness in the joint near the affected area. Movement or mild exercise of the joint usually reduces the stiffness.
But a tendon injury typically gets worse if the affected tendon is not allowed to rest and heal. Too much movement may make existing symptoms worse or bring the pain and stiffness back.
Exams and Tests To diagnose a tendon injury also known as tendinopathy , your doctor will review your medical history and daily activities and conduct a physical exam to check your overall health, areas of pain and tenderness, and range of motion and strength.
These may include: X-rays , which can show any bone-related problems or calcification in tendons or joint structures. MRI magnetic resonance imaging , which can show small tears and areas of tendon, ligament , cartilage , and muscle injury.
Ultrasound , which can show thickening, swelling, or tears in soft tissues such as the bursae and tendons. Andarawis-Puri and her collaborators have a counter hypothesis. They hypothesize that each individual tissue with regenerative abilities within the mouse model—including tendon tissue—has the ability to regenerate regardless of the systemic environment. To investigate this, they have initiated a series of projects.
In one, they have organ-cultured MRL tendons in the lab to see how the tendons filled missing sections. In another project, Andarawis-Puri and her colleagues are swapping injured tendons between regular healer and MRL mice models to see how the tendons heal when they are in the different systemic environments.
In yet another, they are seeding cells from the tendons of normal healer mice models onto decellularized tendons from MRL mice models to see if the tendon matrix from the MRL tendon can reprogram the cells from the normal healer and prompt them to lay down matrix in a regenerative manner. If so, this may be a key step to advancing tissue engineering approaches for humans. It would be great if we could just inject something—say, a cocktail of growth factors—that would actually tell your cells how to lay down good matrix to ultimately produce scarless healing.
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