Copyright
©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Orthop. Apr 18, 2019; 10(4): 192-205
Published online Apr 18, 2019. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v10.i4.192
Published online Apr 18, 2019. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v10.i4.192
Growing pains: What do we know about etiology? A systematic review
Vito Pavone, Andrea Vescio, Fabiana Valenti, Marco Sapienza, Giuseppe Sessa, Gianluca Testa, Department of General Surgery and Medical Surgical Specialties, Section of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, University Hospital Policlinico-Vittorio Emanuele, University of Catania, Catania 95123, Italy
Author contributions: Pavone V, Vescio A and Testa G contributed equally to the work; Valenti F conceptualized and designed the review together with Vescio A and Testa G carried out the analysis; Sapienza M and Sessa G drafted the initial manuscript; all authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript as submitted.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflicts of interest.
PRISMA 2009 Checklist statement: A PRIMA checklist was uploaded.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Vito Pavone, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of General Surgery and Medical Surgical Specialties, Section of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, University Hospital Policlinico-Vittorio Emanuele, University of Catania, Via Santa Sofia, 78, Catania 95123, Italy. vpavone@unict.it
Telephone: +39-95-3782273 Fax: +39-95-3782720
Received: January 2, 2019
Peer-review started: January 4, 2019
First decision: January 29, 2019
Revised: February 15, 2019
Accepted: March 16, 2019
Article in press: March 16, 2019
Published online: April 18, 2019
Peer-review started: January 4, 2019
First decision: January 29, 2019
Revised: February 15, 2019
Accepted: March 16, 2019
Article in press: March 16, 2019
Published online: April 18, 2019
Core Tip
Core tip: Growing pains are benign nocturnal limb pains and the most common cause of musculoskeletal pain in early childhood. Intermittent non-articular pain during the late afternoon or the night with intervals of pain-free days and no objective signs of inflammation are the main clinical features. Despite the etiology of the disease has been widely researched, it is still not fully understood. Lower pain threshold, vascular perfusion changes, anatomical and genetic abnormalities, vitamin D deficiency and psychological factors have been proposed to explain the pathogenesis of growing pain. More studies are needed to understand the complex genesis of the disease.