Construction worker diagnosed with rare Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome after joint vanished

A middle-aged construction worker sought emergency care for an increasingly painful, swollen right shoulder. Radiographs demonstrated that the ball-and-socket structure of the shoulder was missing, with the humeral head gone and the socket destroyed. Subsequent magnetic resonance imaging showed full-thickness tears of the supraspinatus, infraspinatus and subscapularis tendons, effectively disabling the rotator cuff.

Physicians diagnosed the patient with Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome, a rare, aggressive joint-destructive disease first identified in a handful of elderly women in Wisconsin in 1981 and linked to rapid destructive arthritis. The unusual presentation and imaging findings were published as a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.