Chest Pain When Exercising Or Breathing Deeply?

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

No question/request too big or small 😎

❝It the same things always about eating the right foods that’s good for and bad for you. I have Costochondritis anything new about that??❞

First, for everyone else: costochondritis is a (usually painful) inflammation of the rib joints. The symptoms are often made acutely worse by exercise and/or poor posture, and breathing deeply can also trigger pain because that means taking the rib joints through their broadest range of motion.

Now, to answer the question…

Thank you for asking! The short answer is: nothing much, no

Isn’t it annoying when some things just go so under-researched?

In the case of costochondritis, this year (at time of writing) there have been:

• 9 papers published that used the word “costochondritis”
  • 8 of those were about other things and just happened to mention costochondritis, in such contexts as “initially mistaken for” or as a minor aspect of the actual topic of the paper (e.g. a paper about public attitudes to rheumatology, or the case study of a very unlucky woman who had a lot of cancers and also, incidentally, costochondritis).
  • 1 actually pertained to costochondritis, but is unlikely to be helpful to you.

That latter was about pediatric costochondritis, and given the average age of our readership, we will guess you are probably not a child.

In any case, that one paper did find that deficiencies in vitamins B9 and D were associated with pediatric costchondritis.

You can read about it here: Low vitamin D and folate levels are associated with costochondritis: a retrospective cross-sectional study on children with impaired bone health

What can be done?

Well, based on the above, you might want to make sure you’re getting enough of vitamins B9 and D.

It may or may not be a causal or even contributory factor in adults (and to be honest, it’s not even proven as such in children; it’s just an association), but since you do need those vitamins anyway, you might as well.

Aside from that, doctors’ preferred treatment approaches to costochondritis are usually, in this order:

1. Hope it goes away by itself
2. Painkillers, starting with the common kinds (ibuprofen etc) and switching to others if necessary
3. Massage therapy (you might want to see a physiotherapist about this, if you haven’t already)
4. Injections of more “heavy guns” treatments such as corticosteroids (a last resort vs inflammation) or local anesthetics (a last resort vs pain)
5. Surgery—with the caveat that we haven’t found any reference to this aside from that one case study we mentioned about the unlucky woman with all the cancers; in her case, after multiple breast cancers, chemo, surgeries, and cancer meds, she got costochondritis and also an ulcer; they operated to do reconstruction (again) and then she died not long after. You can read her story here.

But, please do not let that case study worry you unduly. It was an extreme case in someone with recurrent cancers, and it happened the way it did because of the chemotherapy and cancer meds.

Aside from all that, since it’s an inflammatory condition, you might consider doing these things if you’re not already: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation

What else could it be?

We will assume that you, dear reader who asked this question, have received adequate professional medical attention and are confident that your costochondritis is indeed costochondritis and not something else.

Nevertheless, for everyone in general, it’s worth mentioning that chest pains can be anything from heartburn to heart attacks; here are some pointers for the milder things:

Sudden Chest Tightness at Midnight: When to Wait It Out

And as for the worst case scenario:

How To Survive A Heart Attack When You’re Alone

Take care!