What is ankle arthritis?

So, Mr. Mishra, can you please tell us about ankle arthritis? So, ankle arthritis is a fairly uncommon condition in foot and ankle, but relatively speaking compared to, for example, hip arthritis or knee arthritis. But the type of people that get ankle arthritis are different from patients with hip and knee arthritis In that post-traumatic patients tend to get ankle arthritis rather than just degenerative changes. So, these are people that have injured their ankles in the past whether it be a minor injury or it might be a ligamentous injury or a fracture and then they will go on to develop arthritis of the ankle joint. So the ankle joint as we talked about previously involves the fibula, tibia and talus and it's the talus that articulates up and down and in these patients they will start getting pain at that joint level as the ankle is moving up and down and the reason for that is visible on this x-ray here this is an external patient who has osteoarthritis people can get rheumatoid arthritis as well but as i said most of our patients that we see have a type of osteoarthritis or post-traumatic arthritis and here you can see that the patient has narrowing of the front of the ankle joint the joint space is narrow and they've got some loose bodies or osteophyte formation which is causing a restriction in the movement and also pain because it impinges and catches when they move the ankle joint. Other patients may come to us with more severe forms of arthritis after an injury so here we can see some different x-rays On this x-ray you can see complete loss of articular surface there's no joint space left at all so this patient has got very severe arthritis. Here you can see a patient who has had a previous injury and deformity of the distal end of the tibia, the distal end of the leg and they only have one bone rather than two bones and their ankle is twisted outwards and here you've got someone who's had a previous fracture and you can see the scars from the previous surgery they've had and their ankle joint is twisted outwards. So these are so more severe forms of arthritis which may require more severe or more significant surgical intervention if we're trying to correct their deformities.