What’s the best non-surgical treatment for thumb OA?
A systematic review gives some guidance despite a lack of high-quality studies
Saline injections and thumb orthosis are among the non-surgical interventions with the best evidence for treating osteoarthritis of the trapeziometacarpal joint, researchers say.
However, they caution that the evidence available for their systematic review ranges from low to moderate quality only.
The Canadian team analysed the French and English literature on the efficacy of a range of interventions, and say their review is the first to cover all non-surgical therapies, including pharmacology, rehabilitation and alternative medicine.
Their final dataset incorporated 1826 thumbs from 1763 participants.
