ABSTRACT

Background: As the most prevalent form of congenital hand malformation, syndactyly carries significant aesthetic and practical implications. For the vast majority of situations, surgery is the best option. Congenital syndactyly can be repaired with skin grafts and local flaps, however the results are often less functional and cosmetic than anticipated and often leave scars and residual syndactyly. So we set out to find out how children's syndactyly healing went in this study.¹

Objective: To analyze the functional outcome of syndactyly repair in children presenting in a tertiary care hospital.

Methodology: This Descriptive case series was conducted at Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, LUMHS Jamshoro / Hyderabad for 6 months. Sample size of 180 cases was recruited through Non-probability consecutive sampling. Then all patients underwent surgery under general anesthesia. In all cases, procedure was performed depends upon the type / extent of syndactyly. Then patients were discharged after recovery and were followed up on 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd months post operatively for assessment of functional outcome of syndactyly repair i.e. no supination and no pronation was noted. All this information was noted on proforma. Data was entered and analyzed using SPSS 22.0.

Results: The mean age of children was 6.30+3.55. There were 66 (37%) females and 114 (63%) male in the sample. There were 128 (71%) cases of simple syndactyly and 52 (29%) cases of complex syndactyly. There were 127 (71%) cases who had no-supination, 162 (90%) cases who had no-pronation. There was significant difference observed between both type of syndactyly (P<0.05) for supination while insignificant for pronation.

Conclusion: Thus we have found that syndactyly repair is effective technique through which we can attain success in maximum number of patients which can help in achieving normal angulation of fingers after surgery.

Key words: Syndactyly, Pronation, Supination, Angulation, Children