Knee pain is a common presenting complaint with many possible causes. An awareness of certain patterns can help the family physician identify the underlying cause more efficiently. Teenage girls and young women are more likely to have patellar tracking problems such as patellar subluxation and patellofemoral pain syndrome, whereas teenage boys and young men are more likely to have knee extensor...

BACKGROUND Acute septic arthritis in a native joint may require more than one surgical debridement to eradicate the infection. Our objectives were to determine the prevalence of failure of a single surgical debridement for acute septic arthritis, to identify risk factors for failure of a single debridement, and to develop a prognostic probability algorithm to predict failure of a single surgica...

We report a patient with hyperosmolar non-ketotic hyperglycaemia who presented with chorea and septic arthritis on his knee. The chorea resolved completely and quickly with correction of the metabolic disturbance, only to return just as quickly when his metabolic disturbance subsequently deteriorated as a result of overwhelming septicaemia, suggesting coexisting cerebral ischaemia, although the...

A patient with Felty's syndrome who developed bilateral knee septic arthritis and septicaemia due to Streptococcus pneumoniae is described. She had had a previous splenectomy for symptomatic thrombocytopenia, having received pneumococcal vaccine before the operation. Measurement of antibody to the 23 vaccine serotypes showed protective concentrations before infection to just two. The infecting ...

A 61-year-old diabetic woman presented with a mycotic aneurysm of the aortic arch, also involving the left subclavian and vertebral arteries, caused by Staphylococcus aureus. Two months before, she had suffered from staphylococcal septic arthritis in her left knee. The patient was treated with antibiotics and an emergency operation was performed involving aneurysm excision and in situ synthetic...

The bacterium Kingella kingae is a species of Gram-negative coccobacillus usually found in the oropharynx. This is an emerging pathogen reported to cause bacteraemia, endocarditis, and osteoarticular infections in children and endocarditis in the immunocompromised adult. However, there are few cases of isolated joint infections reported in the immunocompetent adult. Due to specific isolation te...

The authors report a case of a 35-year-old man with no known underlying disease who presented with fever, cellulitis with hemorrhagic blebs on the left leg, monoarthricular left knee arthritis, multiple organ failure and septic shock. His clinical syndrome was compatible with toxic shock syndrome and his blood grew alpha hemolytic (viridians) Streptococcus mitis. To our knowledge, there are few...

Osteomyelitis of the patella is rare; it essentially occurs in child age. The diagnosis is difficult because of its variable presentation; it should always be considered in patients with persistent peripatellar pain and swelling. This paper reports one case of haematogenous osteomyelitis of the patella not associated with septic knee arthritis. The identification of the organism was performed b...