Patterns of hand and forearm tendon injuries and associated factors in a tertiary Hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2022: A 2 Years Retrospective Study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction: Tendon injuries are the second most common type of injuries of the hand; majority of which are open injuries. Traumatic tendon injuries commonly occur in adult males. Extensor tendons are frequently involved than the flexor tendons which are rarely injured. The commonest causes of hand injuries were road traffic accidents and machine injuries in developing countries where as leisure activities and home accidents were the leading causes of hand injuries in developed nations. Objective: To assess the pattern of occurrence and factors associated with pattern of tendon injuries of the hand and forearm in AaBET hospital Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2022 Methodology: A hospital based cross sectional study was conducted retrospectively on the pattern of tendon injuries of the hand and forearm in AaBET hospital from January 1, 2020- December 30, 2021 GC. Data has been collected from patient charts, hospital admission charts and operation log books. The sample size is 170 and data was collected by trained data collectors and analyzed by using SPSS version 23. Descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression were employed. P-value less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Result: In this study 113(88.3%) patients were males and 15(11.7%) patients were females with a male to female ratio of 7.53 to 1. The mean age of patients is 26.97 years, with maximum age of 61 years and minimum of 8 years. The dominant hand for 124 (96.9%) of the participants was right hand. The commonest cause of tendon injury in this study is machine injury. Tendon injuries in children are commonly caused by glass or knife injuries. Extensor tendon injuries occur more frequently than injury to the flexor tendons. The most common zone involved among flexor tendon injuries is zone V followed by zone II injury while among the extensor tendon injuries, zone VI is the commonest zone of injury followed by zone III and zone V. Right handed patients have 42% increased risk of injury to their left hand with AOR of 1.42 while daily laborers have a 26% decreased risk of injury to their left hands with an AOR of 0.26 Conclusion: Majority of tendon injuries to the hand and forearm occurred in the young population between the ages of 18 to 35 years. Males are much more commonly affected by tendon injuries. Extensor tendon injuries occur more frequently than injury to the flexor tendons Key words: Flexor tendon, extensor tendon, zone of injury, dominant hand