Dr Phil Kieran: Are 'growing pains' a real thing?

The full medical term is 'idiopathic nocturnal pains of childhood' — and these pains might be caused by hypermobility or mechanical factors in the feet rather than a growth spurt

My 14-year-old wakes up during the night with leg pains, but is pain-free during the day. They are going through a growth spurt. Could they be experiencing what my mother used to call 'growing pains'?

Growing pains is a term we have almost all heard in our lives. Although it sounds old-fashioned, most of us know about it because teenage leg pain is common. The term was coined in the 1800s and has stuck around since, probably because it is easier to remember than the suggested medical term: idiopathic nocturnal pains of childhood.

Your teenager's experience, as you describe it, is typical ‘growing pains’, and you can be reassured there isn’t something else going on. These pains come on late in the evening or at night, often waking the person. They tend to be in the long bones of the legs and can be pretty severe. Usually, they will feel a bit better with compression or rubbing. Paracetamol can also be effective in settling the pain. If this is true growing pains, the pain should be gone by morning.

If your child is experiencing swelling at the joints, pain in the middle of the day and when moving around, pain that is worse in the morning or any symptoms of infection such as high temperature or redness around the joint, it’s unlikely he has growing pains, and you should seek a medical review.

One of the reasons medics tried, unsuccessfully, to change the name 'growing pains' is that it doesn’t usually correlate to periods of rapid growth. It was thought this pain happened when the bone was elongating (which happens more rapidly at night), but more recent research shows this isn’t the case.

It is now believed to be caused by factors such as hypermobility or mechanical factors in the feet. These can affect the way forces travel through the bones and cause discomfort. The mechanics of joints can vary quite a lot in childhood, which seems to be why growing pains happen so often. 

This explanation also ties in with the pattern we see whereby the pain often happens on the night after a more active day than usual. Parents often tell me that their child was more active the day before the pain occurred but didn’t get a bang to the leg or any such trauma.

The good news is that this condition is not associated with any long-term issues and almost always resolves itself quickly. So long as the pain follows the typical pattern and has no red flags I’ve outlined above, you can be confident that this is, as your mother used to say, growing pains and will do your teenager no harm.

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