Background: Kienbock disease is characterized by avascular necrosis of the lunate bone. Without treatment, it is usually progressive. While many factors may predispose to Kienbock's disease, it is likely caused by a combination of repetitive loading, vascular risk and mechanical predisposition. Treatments therefore have been designed to decrease compressive loading of the lunate, to prevent lunate collapse, and to allow lunate revascularization. There has been suggested different treatments, no treatment has ever been proved successful and the rate of surgical complication is relatively high. In this study we performed a new surgical method in the treatment of Kienbock disease. In this method we performed lunate decompression which is a very simple procedure and has no potential complication.
Methods: in this study, 11 patients with Kienbock disease in the stage of I to IIIb were surgically treated by a new method of lunate core decompression. The pain, range of motion, functional disability and radiographic indices of the patients were evaluated after two years.
Results: the average age of patients were 29 years, 8(72%) were men. The mean pre-operative pain score (VAS) diminished from 87.5 to 13.5 postoperatively (p<0.001) and DASH score from 84 to 14 (p<0.001) and range of motion was also significantly improved. 7(63%) persons were very satisfied, 2(18%) were satisfied and 2(18%) were not much changed.
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the new surgical treatment of lunate core decompression could probably be a simple and effective treatment of Kienbock disease without any potential complication.