What causes foot pain?

Feet are very important to us humans. We usually rely on our feet to walk. The instep is the upward part of our foot. Sometimes, if we walk too much or wear tight shoes, it will cause pain in our instep. The pain may be so severe that you may not be able to walk normally. Some people suffer from instep pain due to some pathological reasons. If you want to know the causes of instep pain, just read this article!

We often think that swelling and pain in the instep of the foot is caused by trauma, and that it will be fine as long as we apply some ointment. Similar symptoms give us wrong information and cause us to miss the best time to treat the disease.

Rheumatism is a group of diseases that mainly affect joints, bones, muscles, blood vessels and related soft tissues or connective tissues, most of which are autoimmune diseases. The onset is often hidden and slow, the course of the disease is long, and most cases have a genetic predisposition. Both diagnosis and treatment are somewhat difficult; different autoantibodies can be detected in the blood, which may be related to different HLA subtypes; there is a good short-term or long-term relief response to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), glucocorticoids and immunosuppressants.

Broadly speaking

Any disease that causes pain in bones, joints, and muscles can be classified as rheumatism. To date, there are more than 100 diseases in the broad classification of rheumatic diseases, including diseases caused by various reasons such as infectious, immune, metabolic, endocrine, genetic, degenerative, tumor, endemic, and toxic. In a narrow sense, it should be limited to dozens of diseases in the fields of internal medicine and immunology. Some of these diseases are interdisciplinary, such as gout, osteoarthritis, infectious arthritis, etc.

Disease classification

1. Arthritis-based: such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Still's disease which is divided into juvenile and adult types, ankylosing spondylitis (AS), and psoriatic arthritis.

2. Infection-related: such as rheumatic fever, Lyme disease, Reiter's syndrome, reactive arthritis.

3. Diffuse connective tissue diseases: systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), primary Sjögren's syndrome (pSS), systemic sclerosis (SSc), polymyositis (PM), dermatomyositis (DM), mixed connective tissue disease (MCTD), vasculitis.

Causes

1. Immune response: The body stimulates exogenous or endogenous antigens directly or through macrophage presentation, activating the corresponding T cells. Some T cells produce a large number of various inflammatory cytokines, causing varying degrees of damage or destruction to various tissues and organs; some T cells then activate B cells to produce a large number of antibodies, which directly or combine with antigens to form immune complexes, causing damage or destruction to tissues or organs. In addition, monocyte chemoattractant proteins (such as MCP-1) produced by monocytes can also participate in the inflammatory response. Most rheumatic diseases, either due to exogenous antigens produced by infection or endogenous antigens produced in the body, can initiate or aggravate this autoimmune response, and a variety of antibodies may appear in the serum.

2. Genetic background: Recent studies have shown that some rheumatic diseases, especially connective tissue diseases, are closely related to genetics and patient susceptibility and disease expression, which has certain significance for early or atypical cases of the disease and prognosis; among them, HLA (human tissue leukocyte antigen) is the most important.

3. Infectious factors: According to research over the years, a variety of infectious factors, antigens or superantigens produced by microorganisms can directly or indirectly stimulate or initiate immune responses.