Eccentric Wrist Extension Exercises as a Conservative Management Strategy for Pain and Functional Limitation in De Quervain’s Tenosynovitis: An Evidence-Based Review

Abstract

Background: De Quervain’s tenosynovitis is an acute inflammatory condition of the tendinous sheath surrounding the abductor pollicis longus and extensor pollicis brevis muscles. An eccentric wrist extension exercise program is commonly used to reduce severity and restore normal joint function. Objective: To evaluate the effects of eccentric wrist extension exercises in patients with de Quervain’s tenosynovitis. Methodology: This review article describes the findings from the literature of the different studies that were conducted on the eccentric wrist extension exercises in this condition, which focuses on the pathology and its conservative management strategy. An evidence-based review was searched on databases, which include Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed. Articles published between 2020 and 2025 were included in the study. The data obtained from these groups were categorized into four different classes. Anatomy of disease, Pathology and affecting factors, Diagnostic criteria for the injury, Interventions which can be followed to reduce the severity of the disease. Anatomical variations are the changes in the structure or the functional limitation of the region of injury. There were almost 224 articles searched on Google Scholar in time of 0.1 secs. Only a few articles were related to our title rest of the articles did not fulfill the inclusion criteria for the study. There were almost 237 results were observed on the PubMed database in the last five-year range of 2020 to 2025. Multiple articles were searched from the different search engines, and we obtained different results. Results: Over fifteen different evidence-based reviews’ data were collected from various databases, and it was summarized according to the needs of the topic. These articles were reviewed, and important information has been fetched and analyzed with the previous conducted studies on the topic, and related gaps have been identified in the conclusion section for future work. Conclusion: The study concludes that eccentric wrist extension exercises as conservative management and have been proven to be the result oriented for these patients, and it has proven helpful as a conservative management for de Quervain tenosynovitis.