Can Adhesive Capsulitis of the shoulder be a consequence of COVID-19? Case series of 12 patients
One article on PainSci cites Ascani 2021: Complete Guide to Frozen Shoulder
PainSci commentary on Ascani 2021: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
The authors of this paper acknowledge that their study and data cannot prove a link between COVID and frozen shoulder, but their results were nevertheless very-where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire. They studied a dozen cases of frozen shoulder that closely followed a COVID infection (out of 120 cases of adhesive capsulitis that came to their clinic). I’m no statistician, but that seems high.
They also describe some strong specific reasons to suspect a pathological connection.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
We present our series of twelve patients with Adhesive Capsulitis (AC) of the shoulder that developed shortly after COVID-19. We hypothesize that AC may be related to the infectious disease and that both direct and indirect effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection may be involved in its development, as may the sedentary lifestyle forced upon these patients by this disease. Future research will be needed to evaluate the short- and long-term natural history and treatment of these patients as well as to compare them with patients with AC did not occur in concomitance with COVID-19.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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- A double-blinded randomised controlled study of the value of sequential intravenous and oral magnesium therapy in patients with chronic low back pain with a neuropathic component. Yousef 2013 Anaesthesia.
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- Photobiomodulation therapy is not better than placebo in patients with chronic nonspecific low back pain: a randomised placebo-controlled trial. Guimarães 2021 Pain.