Clinical assessment of functional outcome in lateral epicondylitis managed by local infiltration of autologous blood

Abstract

Lateral epicondylitis is a well known elbow disorder known to affect a variety of population. Though the disorder is expected to affect a
lot of sports personnel, the incidence is not uncommon in persons of
household activities. The management comprises of conservative to
operative with a dilemma of what to be done in most of the affected population. A large number of interventions have been tried to delineate
the best modality but none of them proved to be conclusive. The aim of the present study was to prove the efficacy of cheapest possible interventional modality autologous blood for treatment of Lateral Epicondylitis. Twenty five patients of Tennis elbow were included in this study who have attended the OPD of GSVM Medical College and associated LLR Hospital, Kanpur from November 2007 to April 2008 and fulfilled inclusion and exclusion criteria. 78% were females, mostly housewives
involved in regular household activities. All the patients were infiltrated
autologous blood with local anaesthetic infiltration. Patients were deprived
of regular activities for 3 weeks after infiltration. Follow up was done at
weekly interval for 2 weeks and then at 6th week and 12th week. Assessment was done using Visual Analogue Scale ( VAS) and Verhaar et
al scoring system. Total follow up period was 3 months. We observed that
the mean VAS score improved from preinfiltrative 6.40±1.22 to 0.48±1.53
with p value being < .001. 64% patients showed excellent results and 32%
showed good results as per Verhaar et al scoring system on 12 weeks
follow up. One patient did not respond to this procedure and showed poor
result as per Verhaar et al score. Therefore, autologous blood infiltration is
a safe and effective modality in treatment of Lateral Epicondylitis.

KEY WORDS: Lateral epicondylitis; Autologous blood infiltration