If you have a young athlete in your household, you want to do everything you can to keep them healthy and enjoying the sport they love. One issue that can knock them off their feet both literally and figuratively is Sever’s disease, which can manifest in the form of heel pain. Sever’s disease is incredibly common in young athletes because it tends to develop as a result of overstress on your feet during a period of rapid growth. The group most at risk for repetitive stress during a growth spurt? You guessed it – young athletes.

We want to help keep your kids in the game, so in today’s blog, we want to take a closer look at Sever’s disease and how the condition can be prevented and treated.

Causes And Symptoms Of Sever’s Disease

As we touched on a bit in the introduction, Sever’s disease is an issue that oftentimes leads to the onset for heel discomfort in young athletes. Until your children reach skeletal maturity, which typically happens around the age of 15-18 in girls and 18-22 in boys, the ends of their bones are capped by growth plates. These growth plates are softer than the surrounding bone, and they need to be in order to help increase the length of the bone.

These softer growth plates are inherently weaker than adult bone, making them more vulnerable to damage from trauma and repetitive stress. Acute stress during athletics or repetitive stress without enough time off between athletic seasons can end up causing pain and inflammation in the back of the heel. More specifically, this damage occurs when the Achilles tendon pulls on and irritates the growth plate under the heel bone. Children are especially susceptible to growth plate irritation during a growth spurt, when bone growth could lead to a tightening of the Achilles tendon, which then ends up pulling harder on the heel plate.

Symptoms of Sever’s disease include:

• Heel pain
• Discomfort that increases with activity
• Redness
• Swelling
• Gait abnormalities/Limping
• Stiffness

Preventing And Treating Sever’s Disease

You can’t keep your kid from growing, but there are plenty of things you can do to reduce your child’s risk of being impacted by Sever’s disease. For starters, prevention begins by ensuring that your child isn’t overtraining. We understand that the youth sports landscape has become even more hypercompetitive in recent years, but single sport specialization and overtraining are a direct cause of countless injuries in youth athletes every year. Your child needs time off from sport-specific activities, and it’s oftentimes better to have them participate in multiple sports throughout the year instead of playing one sport year round, as this will inherently challenge different areas of their body. This reduces the amount of stress that one specific area of your body has to endure.

Another way that you can work to limit stress on the heel growth plate is to make sure that your young athlete is stretching before and after athletic events. Stretching will help to elongate and relax the Achilles tendon, and as we mentioned above, a tighter Achilles ends up putting more pressure on the heel plate. Appropriately targeting your lower body and your Achilles tendon with a stretching routine prior to activity and after intense stress can help to limit tendon tension. Ice packs and over-the-counter anti-inflammatories can also be helpful if your child is dealing with heel discomfort after athletics.

Finally, you can work to treat and prevent Sever’s disease by working to strengthen your lower body through a targeted physical therapy routine. PT helps to strengthen supportive structures to take strain off the Achilles tendon and in turn limit pressure on the heel growth plate. Combined with a careful rest and return to activity program, and many athletes can keep Sever’s disease pain at bay or treat the issue in short order. Dr. McDonald can work with your young athlete to develop a specific PT program for their unique needs and return to sport goals.

For more information about Sever’s disease and other ailments that tend to affect young athletes, reach out to the team today at (860) 244-8889.