Hello
When it comes to shoulder pain, the most common kind, is caused by a tear in one or several of the muscles of the rotator cuff. Muscles on the shoulder blade.
These kinds of tears are always an old problem the person has had for a long time that just gets progressively worse over time. Often it happens is a cycle of pain, then it hides. While its hiding people believe their problem is better, but it is just getting worse while its quite.
Having said that, I wanted to look in to seeing is this kind of problem more common the older we get?
Let us look at a study I found that will give us this answer.
The study is called “Age-related prevalence of rotator cuff tears in asymptomatic shoulders”.
Asymptomatic means not feeling any pain or symptoms now.
“To determine the prevalence of rotator cuff tears in asymptomatic shoulders we conducted a prospective clinical and ultrasonographic study of 411 volunteers.”
They found “We found evidence of a rotator cuff tear in 23% of the patients.” Almost ¼ of people had this without shoulder pain.
“In group 1 (aged 50 to 59 years), 13% (22 of 167) of the patients had tears; in group 2 (aged 60 to 69 years), 20% (22 of 108) of the patients had tears; in group 3 (aged 70 to 79 years), 31% (27 of 87) of the patients had tears; and in group 4 (age >80 years), 51% (25 of 49) of the patients had tears. An astonishingly high rate of rotator cuff tears in patients with asymptomatic shoulders was thus demonstrated with increasing patient age.”
In my experience this tells me that they likely have had this issue a long time and it’s been coming and hiding. Creating a cycle of ever worsening issues.
Do you want to stop the cycle?
Jason
