Abstract
Objectives: The aim of this study is an assessment of papaverine in vessel diameter of Tamai zone I finger replantation operation
Materials and methods: From January 2019 to January 2020 total 16 cases of finger replantations in Tamai zone I were included. We operated all patients under local anesthesia. All amputated fingers were kept in 2 ml papaverine HCL solution for five minutes before arterial dissection. The structures which dissected and identified were marked with Daylon 9/0. The Image J program measured diameters of proximal and distal vessels which were photographed during the anastomosis. The statistical analysis in this study was conducted using IBM SPSS Version 22.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y.). The significance of differences between proximal and distal vessels assessed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test.
Results: The age of the patients was between 18-72 and the mean age was 44.34. The gender distribution was 14 males and 2 females. Right hand injury was seen in 7 patients. Amputations seen in 5 cases in the middle finger, in 4 cases in the ring finger, in 3 cases in the index finger and equally two cases in the thumb and little finger. In all cases, we recorded the distal vein diameter as larger. Randomly, 5 cases were selected from the cases and statistically significant difference was found between distal and proximal vessel diameters in the SPSS program using Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test from nonparametric tests, and a statistically significant difference was found in favor of the distal vessel (p <0.05).
Conclusion: In fingertip amputations, the vessel’s diameter decreases to distal part of finger. Small vessels diamater’s causes prolongs the anastomosis period and reduces the success of the operation. Bathing the amputated part of a finger in papaverine solution for 5 minutes before the operation gives to total surgery duration and anastomosis time shortened. We sincerely hope that this technique will be beneficial for all surgeons.

Key words: Papaverine , replantation, Tamai zon 1