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Seronegative and negative mri scan? Anyone experience this before diagnosed?

I am a 28 year old male. I am almost always in pain due to nerve compression, pain in the fingers, and pain in the hip.

Right now i am seeing a Rheumatologist for everything besides the nerve compression. I have visible signs of nodules on my hands but so far every detection method has been negative.

I got blood work done, negative. I got an Mri of my left hand where most of the pain is, shows no imflammation. Over the counter anti inflammatory's do not make the pain easier. Today I started a 7mg a day predisone treatment to see if that will affect the pain that I have in the hands and hip.

Has anyone gone through this process of constant negatives on tests, yet still finally got treated successfully? What was your process like?

  1. Hi. Sorry you are going through this. I ended up getting a biopsy of one of the nodules to determine what they were. Wouldn't you know that by the time the pathology report came back saying they were rheumatoids, my bloodwork turned positive.
    You can have RA without your bloodwork being positive. If your doctor doesn't agree with that, then you may want to seek out a second opinion. I had a Rheumatologist at first that believed nothing was real unless the bloodwork said it was. He made my life very difficult. I was in a tremendous amount of pain and could barely walk. I am glad I sought help elsewhere.
    Inflammation can be shown in other places like your SED rate on your bloodwork. Do you know what number your SED rate is? If your ANA is positive, it will have a pattern noted by it. What is your pattern? All of these things help diagnose RA or Lupus depending on what they say. If everything is negative, that would be very strange.
    I hope you are able to get some answers soon.
    KT

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