Generalized joint pain can accompany some illnesses, such as rheumatic fever, or it may follow on from influenza, Salmonella poisoning and other infections. Giardia and Candida may also produce joint pain among their symptoms. Diseases that make the gut wall more permeable to food molecules may also produce aching joints – these include Crohn’s disease, coeliac disease and ulcerative colitis. If the underlying disease is sorted out, the joints tend to get better. In children, vaccination sometimes results in an attack of joint pain. Rarely, generalized joint pain may be an indication of a serious autoimmune disease, called systemic lupus erythematosus or SLE.

In many of these disorders, the pain is produced by immune complexes forming in the blood, and then becoming deposited in the joint. These immune complexes consist of masses of antigens and antibodies. In the examples mentioned above, the antigens are either bacteria (in an infection), the vaccine (in vaccination), food molecules (in Crohn’s disease and coeliac disease) or the body’s own proteins (in autoimmune diseases such as SLE). Because so many immune complexes are formed at once, the system that normally mops them up cannot cope.

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