What are the symptoms of frozen shoulder?

Periarthritis of the shoulder is a common disease problem. Sometimes, if it is serious, it will affect the patient's daily life. Common symptoms are shoulder pain, limited shoulder joint movement, and patients often experience coldness, muscle spasms, or other various pain symptoms.

1. Shoulder pain: Initially, it is paroxysmal pain, most of which are chronic attacks. Later, the pain gradually intensifies or becomes a sudden pain or a knife-like pain. The pain is often aggravated by climate change, fatigue or accidental impact. A major characteristic of this disease is that the symptoms are milder during the day and heavier at night, which is also an early symptom of frozen shoulder.

2. Limited movement of the shoulder joint: The shoulder joint has limited movement in all directions. As the disease progresses, even actions such as combing hair, dressing, washing face, and putting hands on waist become difficult to complete. Especially in severe cases, the function of the elbow joint may also be affected: the hand cannot touch the shoulder on the same side when the elbow is flexed, and especially the elbow flexion movement cannot be completed when the arm is extended backward.

3. Fear of cold: People with this condition are afraid of the cold. Even in summer, they are afraid of the wind blowing on their shoulders. After this symptom of frozen shoulder appears, generally speaking, frozen shoulder has reached the middle stage.

4. Tenderness: Most patients can feel obvious tenderness points around the shoulder joint.

5. Muscle spasm and atrophy: The deltoid muscle, supraspinatus muscle and other muscles around the shoulder may experience spasm in the early stage, and disuse muscle atrophy in the late stage, with typical symptoms such as difficulty in raising the acromion process and difficulty in bending backward. The pain symptoms are relieved

6. Physical examination showed mild atrophy of deltoid muscle and spasm of trapezius muscle. There may be obvious tenderness in the supraspinatus tendon, the long and short head tendons of the biceps brachii, and the anterior and posterior edges of the deltoid muscle. The limitations of shoulder joint are most obvious in abduction, external rotation, and extension. In a few people, adduction and internal rotation are also limited, but flexion is less limited.

7. For patients who are older or have had the disease for a long time, X-rays may reveal osteoporosis of the shoulder, or calcification of the supraspinatus tendon and subacromial bursa.