Injury Triggered Onset?
I am a 46 year old man recently diagnosed with an AS spectrum disorder. However I have had symptoms since I was 21/22. It was bizarre, I woke up one morning and my spinal column felt like it was completely full of inflammation - it was hard to bend it at all. When I turned my neck, in a certain way, I could feel fluid shooting out between the vertebrae very painfully. Over a few weeks the symptoms subsided somewhat but never went away. The fluid shooting sensation started to feel like it was able to move more freely between my vertebrae and gradually went away. But I have not been able to run for more than a few minutes since - the repeated compression on my spinal column, my back is in a great deal of pain for a few days afterwards.
However, prior to all this, I had some knee injuries starting when I was 18. I partially tore my ACL when I was 18 and had a surgery to try to repair the remaining ligament. That failed a couple years later, and I had a full reconstruction within a year of the onset of my AS symptoms.
I was thinking that the injuries and surgeries exposed a lot of different tissues to my immune system, and a great deal of healing and blood flow to those areas. I have family history in both sides for rheumatoid arthritis and AS, and I was thinking perhaps all of this blood flow, healing etc set off the onset with my family history.
Is this plausible?