Different Modalities of Management of Early and Late Traumatic Soft Tissue Defects of The Hand

Abstract

A total of 66 papers were obtained using the mentioned keywords in the research of all internet-based databases. Of these, 45 were excluded due to non relevance to our topic, and 21 papers were included in our study. The total number of cases in all of the studies was 453 cases; with an average of 21.6 cases per study. According to the years of publication, 2018 showed the largest number of publications (8 papers), followed by 2013 (3 papers), then 2010 and 2014 (two papers each). Regarding the type of studies, the most common type was prospective studies, seen in 9 out of the 21 papers (42.9%), followed by retrospective studies in 6 papers (28.6%), cases series in 4 papers (19.1%) and lastly case reports in 2 cases (9.5%). Regarding the mean age of the studied cases, there was wide variation among different papers. The mean age of indicidual papers ranged from 5.75 to 39 years, with an overall mean of 28.3 years and a range from 1-80 years. Regarding the sex distribution, male predominance was constant in nearly all of the cases; ranged from 61.5% to 100%. The total number of cases where sex was mentioned was 541, out of them 442 were males (81.7%).