Relationships between Preoperative Symptoms, Electrophysiological and Intraoperative Findings, and the Outcome in Patients with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Abstract

The shorter the duration of symptoms and the less their severity, the better seems the prognosis for improvement in complaints and disorders of a disease. One can suppose that the clinical symptoms correlate with objective findings. In carpal tunnel syndrome, preoperative findings and outcome seem to be connected with weakness or atrophy of abductor pollicis brevis muscle and failure of long-term benefit [9]. Electrophysiological tests have proved their value in early [1, 7, 24] and differential diagnosis [12, 19, 22]. But it is not certain that there is a significant correlation between the degree of electrophysiological alterations and the degree of nerve compression [10]. In spite of different opinions about the preoperative value of electrophysiological examinations, the improvement or normalization of nerve conduction velocity after operation is generally supposed to correspond to the relief of symptoms [3–6, 14, 17, 20].