Miller: Are there certain activities that bring this out, that precipitate this more than others?ĭr. Over time that repetitive pinching can cause discomfort and start causing hip pain.ĭr. I would think of it somewhat where there's a mismatch between the ball and the socket, where if you have a cup that's round and you have a ball that maybe didn't form quite as round as we'd ideally like it, as you do activity you twist, pivot, you squat, you force the area of the ball that's not round into that round socket, and it starts to pinch. So what we've gotten to understand is a concept of what we call "femoral-acetabular impingement," or "hip impingement," where the ball and the socket get a pinching with activity and range of motion. Everyone's built a little bit differently, exactly, and that shape of your hip joint plays a role in different causes of groin pain and hip pain. FAI: Femoroacetabular Impingement or Hip Impingementĭr. They're different from one person to the next. Aoki: No, it actually, once you start looking at the films and the radiographs a little bit closer, you start looking at shape issues, and we've noticed that bone shape, whether it be the ball or the socket side of your hip joint, that the shape of the joint plays a big role in what we understand. Miller: Do you think that's because it just did not show up on an x-ray, like arthritis shows up?ĭr. So what's interesting, it's surprising that we took so long to kind of understand the young adult hip pain problems, but what we've realized. I think that what probably happened over time was they'd get disappointed, and wouldn't have a good answer, they'd go see someone else, and everyone kept telling them, "No, it's a pulled muscle or it's a groin injury," and they just weren't able to get back to their activity. We'd look at them, we'd look at their films, and we wouldn't see any arthritis, and we'd say, "You strained your groin" or "You pulled a muscle," and we'd send them out. They'd have this radiating pain right in their groin region. we'd have these young adults come in that had hip pain. Aoki: So it's interesting when I went through my training ten years ago, often times we didn't quite know what. If that's the case, what can it be due to? Hip Pain Causesĭr. Steve, hip pain isn't always due to arthritis. He's a professor of orthopedic surgery here at the University of Utah, in the Department of Orthopedics.
Miller: When hip pain is not arthritis pain.