Survey of Ledderhose treatments

We have recently done a survey at the BDS, well we have started one and we are hoping for lots of Ledderhose and Dupuytren's patients to take part, you can go here to take it. So far we have had 90 participants which is better than I was expecting but worse than I was hoping for, a couple of hundred in total maybe ambitious but would making the data more useful. I think longer term it would be great if we could come up with a more definitive and useful survey and ask doctors around the world, though mainly UK (seeing as it would be a BDS thing) to send them out when they do a 1 year review with their patients. 

Still our initial survey was looking at risk factors and treatment options. There was nothing too obvious from the risk factor questions. But people had quite strong opinions on the different treatment options. Below I will only show the results for the response for Ledderhose patients but to see the full set of results so far please go to the BDS Blog.

The above graph shows the three different types of treatments that Ledderhose patients had had, Radiotherapy (blue), Surgery (Green) and Steroid injections (Orange). The first two bits on the left show whether the conditions come back or not, the middle columns shows the average time before it comes back and then on the right are two columns showing whether the patients would recommend the treatment or not. So as you can see: 

• In surgery patients (7) it came back in 5 patients at an average time of 2.5 years. Of those 7 patients only 1 would recommend and 5 said to avoid surgery. 
• For radiotherapy there were also 7 patients. In no patients did it come back and all 7 patients would recommend it. 
• There was only 1 steroid injection patient, they did not have it come back (note that I did have a steroid injection and it did come back but didn't think of it as a proper treatment so didn't include it in the survey) and they would recommend that treatment.

Overall the above data, although from few patients, seems to back what I have seen in the patients that I have interview, that being that the option of surgery is not a great one but that having radiotherapy is seen as the preferred option for a lot of patients.