Joint Injections

What to Expect

You can expect the following during your child's joint injection procedure:

• Your child will be given a sedative or put to sleep and monitored closely by an anesthesiologist.
• The interventional radiologist will guide a needle to the proper location and inject a dye to make the joint more visible through imaging. If the procedure is being performed to diagnose or evaluate a condition, dye is all that is needed.
• If your child is receiving treatment for joint pain and inflammation, the interventional radiologist will use live imaging to inject a steroid exactly where the joint is inflamed.
• Once the procedure is complete, your child will be taken to a recovery room to wake up. There may be some pain and swelling in the joint, so he or she may be given pain medicine. If a steroid was injected, it can take a week or more for the original joint pain to subside.
• Your child will go home the same day.

Joint injections do carry small risks. Sometimes a child has bleeding where the needle went into the joint. Rarely, the joint can become infected or your child can have an allergic reaction to the dye used for an arthrogram.

Any use of steroids carries a slight risk of skin atrophy (thinning of the skin). However, using interventional radiology to inject the steroid greatly reduces the chance of skin atrophy.

Key Points to Remember

• Joint injections are used to relieve pain in joints or to insert a dye called contrast into a joint to make it more visible in an arthrogram (a radiology study specifically for joints).
• Your child will be sedated or under anesthesia during a joint injection procedure.
• Your child will be able to go home the same day after the joint injection.
• It may take up to a week for injected steroids to relieve your child’s joint pain.