When Do Kids Get to Be Kids in Today’s Hectic Lifestyle?
It seems as though kids are constantly running from one activity to the next, never stopping to smell the roses and just hang out with their friends. Some may say that this is a good thing, keeps kids from getting into trouble, but could it also be harming them?
My younger sister is fifteen, and she, like most other kids her age, is constantly running from one extracurricular activity to the next. This constant running around has caused her a significant amount of psychological stress and has resulted in Amplified Musculoskeletal Pain Syndrome (AMPS).
“Amplified musculoskeletal pain syndrome (AMPS) is a very painful medical condition that can cause pain anywhere in the body…the degree of pain children with AMPS experience is more intense than one would normally experience.”(Philadelphia, 2014). In order to understand what is happening physiologically in a patient with AMPS, one should understand how pain is felt normally. Pain is triggered as a response to tissue damage. This damage then sends a signal through the pain nerve and to the spinal cord. The spinal cord transfers the signal to the brain where it is recognized as pain. In an AMPS patient, there is a short circuit in the spinal cord which causes the pain signal to not only travel to the brain but also through the autonomic nervous system. The transference of pain through this system causes the blood vessels to constrict leading to a decrease in blood flow and oxygen delivery throughout the body. This syndrome has three major causes: injury, illness, and psychological stress.
My sister’s AMPS presents itself as chronic pain in her legs. It is caused from psychological stress, and her hectic lifestyle of running from one activity to the next makes it very difficult to deal with her syndrome. When she was diagnosed last year, she was required to quit all extracurricular activities until the pain was able to be managed. She has to desensitize her legs four times a day and visit a phycologist once a week to learn how to deal with the stress in order to control the pain.
References
Philadelphia, T. C. (2014, February 23). Amplified Musculoskeletal Pain Syndrome (AMPS). Retrieved October 16, 2017, from http://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/amplified-musculoskeletal-pain-syndrome-amps
I am so sorry to hear that this has happened to your sister! I hope that she is doing okay and is handling living the AMPS as best as she can. Regarding AMPS in general, I was wondering if you found anything on if there are individuals who are more predisposed to developing AMPS? There are lot of adolescents and children who are participating in many extracurricular activities and live very busy lives but not all of them are developing AMPS, so why do some develop AMPs while others do not? In an article by Sherry (2000), he talks about AMPS occurring more in females (80%) who are typically have a higher socioeconomic status, which is interesting to consider that one of the main causes you listed was stress. There is typically more stress in individuals with lower socioeconomic status compared to higher socioeconomic status, but perhaps this just demonstrates that different types of stressors lead to different types of negative impacts? It is also interesting that AMPS occurs more frequently in females; what do you think would cause this to occur? Again, just thinking out loud, maybe it is due to females having the added pressures of excelling in academics, socially, as well as athletically; females believing that they need to prove that they can handle the stresses of sports and extracurriculars just as well as males. This is a very interesting disorder with gaps that require a lot of critical thinking!
ReplyDeleteReferences:
Sherry, D. D. (2000). An overview of amplified musculoskeletal pain syndromes. Journal of
Rheumatology-Supplement-, 44-48.