Uniportal endoscopic surgery of carpal tunnel syndrome: technique and clinical results

The endoscopic carpal tunnel release is a new minimally invasive method which has been used to decompress the median nerve in the carpal tunnel for the past decade. Advantages of this method should be a decreased postoperative morbidity and earlier return to work. Preoperative complaints, postoperative results and complications of the therapy for a total of 60 patients are presented. All endoscopic releases were performed using the Agee uniportal technique. The overall success rate in our study was 56/60 (93.3%). 47/54 (87.0%) patients were completely free of pain after endoscopic surgery. An improvement in preoperative pain was noted in 4/54 (7.4%) patients. Hypesthesia and dysesthesia disappeared totally in 39/46 (84.8%) patients. An improvement of the sensible disturbances was observed in 4/46 (8.7%) cases. 10/13 (76.9%) preoperative pareses recovered completely, 3/13 (23.1%) remained unchanged. The complication rate in total in our series was 4/60 (6.7%), thereof 3 cases of postoperative infection (5%) and one serious median nerve injury (1.7%). The mean time for return to work was 29 days. Summing up, it may be said that monoportal endoscopic carpal tunnel release appears to be an effective and safe minimally invasive method for the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome.