Anterior knee-pain syndrome

Anterior knee-pain syndrome would best be defined as a painful condition that arises in or around the patellofemoral joint and is insidious in onset and bilateral, with no macroscopic gross pathology. Anterior knee pain as a descriptive term would define the need to search further for a specific cause of pain, because neither patellar cartilage damage nor malalignment would necessarily be correlated to pain. The examining physician should be aware that specifically in adolescents the higher chance would be that, eventually, no clear-cut pathology would be found; thus, great caution should be taken before diagnosing anterior knee-pain syndrome as existing unilaterally. It could be claimed, following the above, that as opposed to the term "anterior knee pain," the term "anterior knee-pain syndrome" is an exclusion diagnosis that can be applied after macroscopic pathology has been ruled out.