Carpal tunnel syndrome historical perspective

Overview

Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is the most common and a well–recognized mononeuropathy in medicine. Historical evaluations showed that it took more than 100 years from the initial reports and observations to describe the pathophysiology of this problem as a median nerve compression of wrist.

Historical Perspective

According to the available pieces of evidences about the Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) are interesting. Meanwhile, the "acroparesthesia" was used to describe a chronic and early morning and nocturnal paresthesias, numbness, pain, and weakness in hand with a slight decrease of sensibility of fingers; which was more common in female population. Nowdays, we can call this condition as Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS).

The first reported description of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) was made by Paget in 1854, at the time he published a clinical and gross pathological description of CTS in his Lectures on Surgical Pathology [1,2]. In his report, he cited two patients in which he believed the median nerve was injured. In the first case, a man had a cord drawn tightly around his wrist, resulting in pain and impaired sensation in his hand, contraction of the fingers, and repeated ulcerations on the back of the hand. Seven years after the trauma, the arm was amputated because of intractable pain. A dissection of the amputated limb revealed ‘‘the median nerve, where it passes under the annular ligament, is enlarged with adhesions to all the adjacent tissues, and induration of both it and them’’ [3].