Thoracic outlet compression syndrome: the lack of reliability of its clinical assessment.

Abstract

Four manoeuvres advocated for the assessment of thoracic outlet compression were performed on 64 randomly chosen volunteers. Although only 17% had any symptoms of thoracic outlet compression, 58% had a positive result in at least one of the manoeuvres. Only 2% were positive for more than two manoeuvres. We suggest this low specificity devalues these tests in clinical practice. We were unable to correlate our clinical results with the findings of digital photoplethysmography.