Risk Factors & Prevention

Risk factors fall into four categories: repetitive motion activities, health and lifetyle, genetics, and medications. You can take preventative measures to minimize your risk. If you do feel an injury coming on, try to catch it as early as you can because prevention is easier than cure.

Minimizing Risk

Tendinopathy usually sneaks up on you. At first, the pain only comes after a long session of the activity that aggravates it. Later, the pain comes at lower levels of the activity and lasts longer. Finally, the pain becomes a part of your daily life and even normal activities can make it worse.

Whatever your activity, you can help minimize your risk by following these preventative tips:

Use equipment that has good ergonomic design and that is sized correctly for your body
Use good technique
Take plenty of breaks
Ovoid long overtime hours
Maintain healthy body weight and blood sugar levels
Avoid fluoroquinolone antibiotics and minimize cortisone shots
Listen to your body's warning signs and make changes to your routine if you experience burning, stinging, aching or tenderness to the touch in your tendons
If you have pain that won't go away, seek help from a specialist in tendon injuries

A collage with four photos of people doing repetitive motion activities that can lead to tendinopathy. One photo shows a contractor using a hammer, one photo shows someone typing at a keyboard, one photo shows a runner, and one photo shows a drummer.

What Are The Risk Factors For Tendinopathy?

Repetitive Motion

Tendinopathy can result from long hours of activities such as playing sports, using computers, playing musical instruments, or doing manual labor. It can result from activities performed as part of your profession or recreation. Some occupations that have increased risk for chronic tendon injuries include assembly line workers, computer programmers, writers, court recorders, data entry processors, sign language interpreters, cashiers, professional athletes, and musicians. The amount of overuse (per day, month, year) and lack of recovery time affects the severity of the injury.

Health & Lifestyle Factors

Some health and medical conditions can predispose you to tendinopathy. If you are overweight and/or have diabetes, you have increased risk. Losing weight, improving your diet, and controlling your blood sugar can improve your tendons. Women are more prone to tendinopathy after menopause, and older people (over 60) in general are more prone than younger people. Certain collagen diseases can also predispose you (see Genetics, below). Maintaining fitness with proper training techniques can help to reduce risk. Using ergonomic tools in your daily activities also reduces risk.

Genetics

Genetics play a factor in tendinopathy, but much more research is needed in this area. Collagen defects like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome seem to be associated with higher risk for acute and chronic tendon injuries, and other specific genetic variants are being discovered. Here is a sampling of some research into genetic variants that seem to be associated with increased risk for tendinopathy.

Medications

Four classes of prescription drugs have been associated with chronic tendon injuries: quinolones, long-term glucocorticoids, statins, and aromatase inhibitors. Antibiotics in the fluoroquinolone family (such as Cipro, Levaquin, and Avelox) have been associated with serious tendon injuries in some people. Many patients are not informed of this risk and are not given the chance to decide whether to take an alternative antibiotic. The FDA issued a warning about quinolones in May 2016, saying that their risks outweigh their benefits for sinusitis, bronchitis, and UTI whenever other treatment options can be used instead. A case study about fluoroquinolone-induced tendinopathy can be found here. Some studies have raised questions about the effects of statins on tendons, such as one study that found differences in collagen construction during healing of tendon injuries with and without statins, and one study that found changes in tendons after chronic exposure to statins, and one study that found statins have negative effects on mesenchymal stem cells; however, a systematic review of literature did not find a cause and effect relationship between statins and tendinopathy, so the jury is still out on statins.