Cubital tunnel syndrome is the second most common peripheral entrapment syndrome. To date, there is no true consensus on the ideal surgical management. A minimally invasive, endoscopic approach has gained popularity but has not been adequately compared to the more traditional, open approach.
With compliance with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, a systematic review was performed to identify studies published between 1990 and 2016 that compared the efficacy of endoscopic cubital tunnel release to open cubital tunnel release. A meta-analysis was then performed through a random-effects model with inverse variance weighting to calculate I values for heterogeneity analysis. Forest plots were constructed for each analysis group.
Five studies involving 655 patients (endoscopic cubital tunnel release, n = 226; open cubital tunnel release, n = 429) were included. Meta-analysis revealed no significant superiority of open release in achieving an "excellent" or "good" Bishop score (OR, 1.27; 95 percent CI, 0.59 to 2.75; p = 0.54) and reduction in visual analogue scale score (mean difference, -0.41; 95 percent CI, -1.49 to 0.67; p = 0.46). However, in the endoscopic release cohort, lower rates of new-onset scar tenderness/elbow pain were found (OR, 0.19; 95 percent CI, 0.07 to 0.53; p = 0.002), but there was a higher incidence of postoperative hematomas (OR, 5.70; 95 percent CI, 1.20 to 27.03; p = 0.03). The reoperation rate in the endoscopic and open release groups was 4.9 and 4.1 percent, respectively (p = 0.90).
The authors demonstrated equivalent overall clinical improvement between endoscopic and open cubital tunnel release in terms of Bishop score and visual analogue scale score reduction. Because of the low power of most studies, further investigations with a larger patient population and longer follow-up are needed to better characterize the role of endoscopic cubital tunnel release.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 10. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 07 August 2018.
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#3,966,920
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#60
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Altmetric has tracked 27,394,475 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 85th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
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