Blog

Deformity, aggressiveness and severity of Dupuytren’s

When is the most effective time to treat Dupuytren’s and what is the best treatment? These are not easy questions. Dupuytren’s responds differently and recurs differently in different people: starting with the same deformity (how bent the fingers are), people who do worse are described as having “aggressive” Dupuytren’s. Severity

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Sex and Dupuytren’s in Boston

Dupuytren’s is fairly common in Boston, but seems different than the European flavor in terms of sex. The numbers on almost 2000 Boston Dupuytren’s patients were sorted out, and here’s how things roll in Boston: men develop Dupuytren’s almost twice as often as women, but it may seem like more

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Monkey model for Dupuytren’s

An experimental monkey model of Dupuytren’s Disease was performed to confirm or refute the microtrauma hypothesis of Dupuytren’s. The outcome: the reaction to rupture of the palmar fascia produced lesions identical to those of early Dupuytren’s, although did not lead to contractures during the period of study. The conclusion was

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What’s old is new in Dupuytren’s

Larsen’s insightful study and review of the demographics and microscopic anatomy of Dupuytren’s disease is over 50 years old, but reads like a recent publication. The author describes and ponders the significance of topics which were well known at the time: perivascular inflammation adjacent to but not within the affected

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Nice Overview of Dupuytren Disease

Time to pause and look at the big picture. Here is a balanced overview of the history, biology, etiology and epidemiology of Dupuytren Disease: https://dupuytrens.org/DupPDFs/2003_Thurston.pdf

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The potential of cryotherapy and Dupuytren’s

Myofibroblasts are part of the normal tissue repair response to almost all injuries: cut, crush, burn, chemical injury, infectious gangrene, and others – with one exception: freeze injury. Freeze burns don’t contract, possibly because only in freeze injury, the original collagen matrix scaffold is preserved, which may inhibit myofibroblast formation:

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Is Dupuytren’s work related?

A specific gene has not been definitively associated with Dupuytren’s, but the best evidence suggests that the primary cause is genetic. There are factors which alter risk, such as diabetes and local trauma, but these are minor compared with the underlying genetic risk. The question of causation is not simply

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Vitamin E treatment of Dupuytren’s Contracture

Treating Dupuytren’s with vitamin E. Does it work? No, according to this 50 year old study, documenting results with before and after plaster casts of the bent fingers. The results: no improvement in the degree of contracture. This is a pretty straightforward clearly documented study, which answers the question “Does

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Not your typical Viking’s Dupuytren’s

In the Viking era, boats from what is now Denmark travelled west across the North Sea to invade what is now Great Britain, but boats from what is now Sweden travelled south across the Baltic Sea and took rivers deep into what is now southern Europe, where they may have

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