99% of adults over 40 have shoulder "abnormalities" on an MRI, study finds

If 99% of adults have an abnormality, it ceases to be abnormal regardless of its effects

Best thing a doctor ever told me was "you CAN get imaging done, but I'd like to warn you that there is a near-certainty we'd find something wrong with your shoulder and your back".

Given that most commenters do not seem to have read the article perhaps the headline could be more explicit about 'MRIs find "abnormalities" but they seem to have no relationship to actual health problems"

Who's the freak without an abnormality?

Most of my shoulder issues are sleep related since I sleep on my side. Getting a body pillow system, was costly but kinda worth it. Helps with shoulder and GERD. Only issue is that it's kinda warm and I like to sleep cool.

Closely related to a huge problem in American health care --- overprescription, particularly of surgical procedure. There's evidence that some widespread classes of surgical intervention --- shoulder "impingement" in particular --- have outcomes no better than placebos in controlled trials where people literally get placebo incisions.

Do they define if this relates to anything noticeable in your day to day?

For example, I can put my right hand above my shoulder and left hand near my lower back and easily connect both hands behind my back with fully interlocked fingers by converging in the middle. They reach to the other hand's palm.

But I can only barely touch my fingers with both hands if I switch it up so my left hand is up top.

I have no pain or day to day mobility issues but something is lopsided. Is that what they consider abnormal?

I have a giant metal plate in mine which I guess is kindof abnormal.

I have three kids and they've messed up my dominant schoulder (left).

I don't know what causes it, but even without major issues I think a lot of people continually loose range of motion in the shoulder as they age. So this doesn't surprise me.

Interesting. What happens at 40 to make MRIs no longer accurate?

Evolution never really bothered with the wellbeing of 40+ year olds.

related discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008607

What about the other 1%? I feel for them.

Just hit my mid twenties. Want to say I started having some shoulder issues around 20 years old. Although correlation =! causation, I largely think this is because of my lifelong computer usage and PC gaming. It doesn't bother me all the time, but every few months something will change up and it comes back. Surprisingly, my wrists and hands are completely fine, no carpal tunnel or anything similar.

Reading this title made me sit up in my chair.

Even though they never have any neck pain, many shoulder issues are actually caused by pinched nerves in the cervical spine.

100% of all things that do not asexually reproduce are mutants

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You call it "abnormality", I call it evolution. We are not the same.