Long-term outcome of frozen shoulder
One page on PainSci cites Hand 2008: Complete Guide to Frozen Shoulder
PainSci commentary on Hand 2008: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
In 223 frozen shoulder patients, after about 4 years on average, 40% still had symptoms, but almost all of them were mild (94%), and “only 6% had severe symptoms with pain and functional loss.” Roughly two thirds of patients were women, and 20% of cases were on both sides. No cases were recurrences.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Two-hundred and sixty-nine shoulders in 223 patients with a diagnosis of primary frozen shoulder were studied. The main outcome measure was the Oxford shoulder score. The mean follow-up from symptom onset was 4.4 years (range, 2-20 years). The mean age at symptom onset was 53.4 years; with women affected more commonly than men (1.6:1.0). Twenty percent of patients reported bilateral symptoms, but there were no recurrent cases. In the long term, 59% of patients had normal or near normal shoulders and 41% reported some ongoing symptoms. The majority of these persistent symptoms were mild (94%), with pain being the most common complaint. Only 6% had severe symptoms with pain and functional loss. Those with the most severe symptoms at condition onset had the worst long-term prognosis, P < .001.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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