Tori Rodriguez is a journalist and psychotherapist based in Atlanta. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. The staff at Orthopaedic Associates utilizes both cutting-edge therapies and traditional treatments to address a variety of musculoskeletal conditions. For more information, or to schedule a consultation, call Log in to access your medical records and test results, request appointments, or send a private message to your doctor.
If you need access, let us know! We treat all kinds of orthopedic conditions. Find your condition or treatment in our patient education library to learn more! Orthopedic Specialists provide expert treatment for acute or chronic pain of the back, neck, spine, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, foot and ankle. Understanding how a joint can be naturally more or less flexible requires a quick lesson in human anatomy. There are two things that limit the motion of a joint: the contours of the bones and cartilage, or the ligaments.
When someone is able to pull their thumb back to their arm, that's usually because their ligaments have afforded them a little extra motion. Some double-jointed individuals, on the other hand, owe their flexibility to their bones. A common form of hypermobility involves the elbow.
Some people can bend this joint in the wrong direction so that their forearm swings beyond degrees. There's a knob of bone that forms the pointy part on the back of the elbow called the olecranon. Actually, a big hook," explains Habib. That hook fits into a small groove on the back of the humerus, the upper arm bone. And when you're extending your arm, that hook slides into that little groove. When it hits the end of the groove, you can't bend your elbow any further.
Research suggest women are far more likely to have hyperflexible joints Credit: Getty Images. A study of adult female twins in the UK supported earlier claims of a genetic basis for hypermobility: pairs of identical twins were nearly twice as likely to both have hypermobility than were fraternal twins. As long ago as the s and s , researchers observed that hypermobility seemed to run in families. And research has also revealed that hypermobility diminishes with age. In others, there is an underlying medical reason for the joint laxity.
For example, people with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome have abnormal connective tissue, allowing for excessive joint motion. Joint hypermobility is defined as "abnormally increased mobility of small and large joints beyond the limits of their physiological movement.
People of Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent are more likely to have hypermobility. People from the Indian subcontinent have more supple hands than people of European ancestry. Some people can train their joints to have more mobility, and this is often a focus of sports and activities that require great flexibility.
For example, ballet dancers and gymnastics often increase their joint mobility by focused and continued efforts to stretch the ligaments and connective tissue around the joint. For most people, this increase in joint mobility does not have any medical symptoms. On the other hand, people with true joint hypermobility are born with genetic differences in the makeup of their collagen that allows for the laxity of joints, without ever having to try to stretch the tissues.
The factors that can contribute to having hypermobile joints include:. When your joint hypermobility leads to pain or increased injuries, it rises to a classification of a joint hypermobility syndrome.
Symptoms may include joint pain and stiffness, clicking, dislocation, fatigue, and recurrent sprains. A visit to your healthcare provider can lead to a diagnosis. One tool they use is scoring the movements of your thumb, wrist, fifth finger, elbows, lower back, and knees to produce the Beighton score and using the Brighton criteria to further assess the number of hypermobile joints, pain, dislocations, injuries, and lax skin.
Physical therapy and exercise can help strengthen and protect the joints and muscles.
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