Reflex sympathetic dystrophy : recognition of some risk factors

الملخص EN

Background: Reflex sympathetic dystrophy occurs most often in the extremities after an injury.

It causes the limb to undergo chronic pain, swelling, redness, tenderness and stiffness with patchy rarefaction.

The diagnosis is mainly clinical and delay in diagnosis ends with poor prognosis.

Therefore predicting this problem is important by noticing the risk factors.

Aim of this study is to highlight some risk factors for development of this disorder.

Patients and methods: The study included those patients who sustained trauma to their extremities or underwent surgery.

Children and those with clear nerve injury were excluded from the study.

Those who did not show the clinical features of RSD were included in the group 1 and we considered them as a control group, while those who had RSD features were included in the group 2.

Results: The total number of the patients were 143 case.

In Group 1 the male to female ratio was 3:2, the average age was 36 years.

65 of them had trauma to their upper limb and 31 to lower limb.

Most of them had no psychological symptoms.

In Group 2 the male to female ratio was 1:4 and the average age was 53 years.

27 with upper limb trauma and 20 with lower limb.

All the patients of this group had clear psychological disturbance and 45 (95.7%) of them had pre-morbid stressful personality.

Conclusion: age (middle), gender (female) and stressful personality are risk factors to develop RSD if such a person sustained trauma or did a surgical procedure.

The extremity involved and the type of injury seems to have no role in development of RSD.