I posted this message to another topic, but wanted to create a new topic and hope others can share other sources of information.

The following link is to a 2003 study published in the UK that addresses dups and raises questions with NA studies. Its worth reading. In summary, some of the conclusions are:

""http://www.nice.org.uk/pdf/ip/177overview.pdf

National Institute for Clinical Excellence, UK, “Validity and generalisability of the studies (Of Needle Aponeurotomy)

• In general the studies are of poor methodological quality. Little information was reported on factors such as patient characteristics, selection and measurement of outcomes.

• In a number of papers the severity of the condition in study participants was unclear, and one paper excluded from the analysis those patients who initially did not have a successful outcome.

• While recurrence rates after the procedure ranged from 11% to 65%. These rates should be interpreted with some caution, given the different populations and time points in which they were measured.

• Considerable loss to follow up was reported in the Badois and co-workers (1993) paper. It is unclear whether there was similar loss to follow up in the results of the 1995 study. It is also unclear what impact this loss to follow up might have on re-operation and/or recurrence rates.

• The papers by Foucher and co-workers (2001a, b), although separate reviews, do include a subset of the same patients. This is also the case for the results reported by Badois and co-workers (1993).

• A considerable amount of literature on this procedure is published in French. This literature does not include comparative information; instead most of the studies seem to be case-series papers.

In general, papers reported on a limited number of outcomes and it was often unclear at what time point outcomes were measured. The number of hands was frequently used as a denominator to measure outcomes.""


If sample groups are excluding poor outcomes, that would be very troubling. Be interested in other studies (pro or con) and hope others can share those.