My mother has had extreme hip/leg pain for almost a year now, to the point where she can hardly walk, what could cause this? my mother has had extreme hip/leg pain for almost a year now, to the point where she can hardly walk and is now using a cane. it

If : If your mother's bone scan of the hip did not show any signs of loosening of the hip implant, then i think it is unlikely that her pain is coming from the hip. I would be more concerned about her spinal stenosis. Narrowing of the spinal canal (stenosis) often causes numbness, tingling, and burning pain in the legs. These symptoms can often be relieved with an operation to decompress the pinched nerve roots. I think you should take your mother to an orthopaedic spine surgeon. If you can't find anyone close to home, consider pittsburgh, morgantown, or columbus. Be sure to bring all of her xrays and bone scans (images, not just the reports). Good luck.

I'm : I'm sorry your mother isn't doing well. In piecing her history together from the information you provided, there's at least one salient point that seems to have gotten lost in the medical shuffle. This pain was all initiated by a fall about one year ago. Thus, there's a good chance it's being generated by a musculoskeletal problem, and her hip prosthesis is the primary suspect. (one telltale clue to a bad hip is to have a patient sit in a chair and try to place the ankle of the bad leg on the knee of the good one [like most men cross their legs]; if that really hurts your mother's right hip, that's probably where the trouble is.) now, due to the difficulty of revising a hip, orthopedic surgeons understandably do everything they can to coax as many miles as possible from a prosthesis before they dive in to fix it. However, in a quest to find some other (any other) cause for your mother's pain, it seems like everyone's attention has taken increasingly widening circles around the most likely cause of her symptoms: her hip. Despite the unrevealing imaging studies that have been done to date, i think her hip deserves another look. A loosened prosthesis can appear maddeningly normal on x-rays, and other imaging studies may only show subtle evidence. If your mother's autoimmune workup comes up empty (as i suspect it will), ask the orthopedist if there's any other way to evaluate that hip. I hope things settle down for your mom soon!