Diagnosis and Treatment of Trigger Finger in Brazil - A Cross-Sectional Study.

 The present paper aims to evaluate the therapeutic planning for trigger finger by Brazilian orthopedists.  This is a cross-sectional study with a population composed of participants from the 2018 Brazilian Congress on Orthopedics and Traumatology (CBOT-2018, in the Portuguese acronym), who answered a questionnaire about the conduct adopted for trigger finger diagnosis and treatment.  A total of 243 participants were analyzed, with an average age of 37.

Trigger Finger Treatment.

Trigger finger is a frequent condition. Although tenosynovitis and the alteration of pulley A1 are identified as triggering factors, there is no consensus on the true cause in the literature, and its true etiology remains unknown. The diagnosis is purely clinical most of the time.

Percutaneous release of trigger fingers.

Open surgery has been indicated as the surgical treatment for trigger finger for many years; however, minimally invasive techniques are replacing conventional methods. Minimally invasive techniques enable early recovery of the patient with minimal damage to soft tissues. The authors’ study showed that levels of effectiveness of open surgical and percutaneous methods were superior to those of the conservative method using corticosteroid based on the cure and reappearance rates of the trigger.

Treatment of trigger finger: randomized clinical trial comparing the methods of corticosteroid injection, percutaneous release and open surgery.

Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of CS injection, percutaneous pulley release and conventional open surgery for treating trigger finger in terms of cure, relapse and complication rates.

Methods: One hundred and thirty-seven patients with a total of 150 fingers were randomly assigned and allocated into one of the treatment groups, with treatments allocated into 150 opaque and sealed envelopes. We included patients >15 years of age with a trigger on any finger of the hand (Types II-IV) and used a minimum follow-up time of 6 months.

Anatomical study of the A1 pulley: length and location by means of cutaneous landmarks on the palmar surface.

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to evaluate palmar surface parameters to identify the exact location of the proximal edge of the flexor tendon A1 pulley relative to the digital palmar crease of the index, middle, ring, and little fingers and to evaluate the length of this pulley.

Methods: We studied 280 fingers on 70 hands from 35 fresh human cadavers, initially by measuring the distance between the digital-palmar and proximal interphalangeal creases (measure A), followed by dissection of the fingers and measurement of the distance between the proximal edge of the A1 pulley and the digital-palmar crease (measure B) and the length of the A1 pulley (measure C). We carried out statistical analysis using Hotelling's multivariate T(2)-test and the paired-samples t-test.