Nodular Shrinking in Stage 0 Dupuytren Disease: an Evidence-based Approach for Early Stage Treatment to Prevent Progression to Advanced Finger Contractures

Dupuytren disease (DD) is a common hand disorder with disabling finger contractures that may require surgery to restore function. The contractures are caused by progressive fibroproliferative tissue forming nodules and strands in the palmar fascia that eventually cause loss of finger extension. In the early stages of the disease, the nodules (Tubiana stage 0) are usually painless, but a reason for concern to many patients. They often seek the hand surgeon's advice and worry about losing hand function the coming years, commonly requesting for precautionary measures to stop evolution towards contractures (Tubiana stage 1-4). Not rarely, lifestyle measures and even risky treatment options as radiotherapy are advised, yet no therapy to prevent disease evolution has a solid proven effect. Furthermore, reliable non-invasive measurement of early stage DD is not validated.

However, this is needed to explore any efficient preventive treatment that may be cost-efficient for patients and healthcare.

Evidence was found that pharmacotherapy may influence DD evolution, but valuable clinical trials are limited. Case series and non-published explorative follow-up suggested local treatment with antioxidant vitamin E to possibly interfere with an evolution of DD nodules to contracting strands. Therefore, it is recommended to consider local creams to the palms in such situation.

This study aims to provide evidence on efficiency of this non-invasive treatment option. Secure measurement of nodule evolution is a clinical challenge. To measure this evolution, ultrasound and MRI scanning are currently being performed. In clinical practice, although clinical staging of contractures is reliable, stage 0 (nodules) is more challenging to quantify. If observed, nodules (evolution) are often measured by clinical yardstick assessment. However, this technique is unvalidated and unreliable with inevitable significant inter- and intra-observer unreliability, which may improve with sonography. A strict individual follow-up by the treating clinician is needed to standardize measurement of selected (treated) nodules. Therefore, simple ultrasound by the treating clinician may provide an good tool to collect data. The V-Scan (simple office-based Bluetooth ultrasonography) may aid to achieve this and its use is successfully implemented since 1 year at the hand Surgery department at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) by and under supervision of Prof Dr X. Libouton.

This study aims to introduce and validate this non-invasive scan method and provide a prospective double blind investigation of a measurable effect of non-invasive preventive treatment for stage 0 DD to improve clinical outcome.