Reoccurrence of CTS
Female, 23 years old, non-smoker, 8 stone and never been pregnant.
After 18 months of normal use I have again been diagnosed with CTS. I now would like to now know what to do. My initial CTS was a nightmare, thrown from physiotherapist to consultant and around and around. Once diagnosed by a hand surgeon ( in 2 minutes ) I had the surgery and all was well. It took a while to get some feeling back in my fingers but it did return thankfully. Now I'm suffering all the same issues as before, but I would say they are worse than before. So I am now in the position not knowing what to do, but also confused as to why I've got it again. I feel I need some very concise advice as I'm worried. The only thing I have been told by a local physio ( by telephone ) was do not have a 2nd operation.
I agree that an underlying cause could be the issue to have led to this but have to say from all I've read I don't appear to meet any of typical profiles of those who have suffered. As to whether the diagnosis was correct I can't say obviously but I did and again do have all the typical symptoms. I did have some pre-op tests but nothing post-op. I will now complete a diagnostic questionnaire to see if that may helpful.
Thank you
Thanks for the questionnaire. Having looked through it I would agree with the website's automatic evaluation of that. It does not actually sound very much like CTS. About the only thing strongly in favour is the response to injection. In that situation I would probably start off by going to see a neurologist, getting some more nerve conduction studies done and comparing those with the pre-operative set - did they tell you what these showed? JB
My first thought would be to wonder whether you have an underlying cause for your CTS. CTS is something of a rarity in your age group without some explanation such as a strong family history, diabetes, renal failure or some such. My second thought would to query whether the diagnosis was right as recurrence 18 months after successful surgery is even rarer than CTS in a 21 year old. To address those concerns and try to come up with a plan of action we would need a detailed history of the original presentation, any available investigation results (especially nerve conduction studies and if we are very lucky ultrasound imaging) from before and after surgery, and probably some new investigations now. If the symptoms now are the same as the original ones before surgery it would also be useful to go through the diagnostic questionnaire on the website here as that tells me a lot about you without exposing it to other readers of the forum - which you should remember is a public medium. JB