Outcomes and recovery timelines of 249 patients with Parsonage-Turner syndrome from a major tertiary care center.

BACKGROUND

Parsonage-Turner syndrome (PTS) is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by sudden, severe shoulder and arm pain followed by weakness. Recovery time varies considerably, creating prognostic uncertainty. This study used a tertiary care health system database to characterize recovery trajectories and identify demographic factors associated with recovery duration.

METHODS

Patients from Mass General Brigham system were identified using an Enterprise Data Warehouse query for diagnoses of "Parsonage Turner Syndrome," "neuralgic amyotrophy," and "brachial neuritis" from a dataset of 4,800,000 patients from January 2016 to March 2025. Of 2,552 identified patients, 249 met strict clinical criteria for confirmed PTS. Key time points were extracted from clinical notes and Kaplan-Meier survival analyses were performed to estimate time to recovery.

RESULTS

The cohort included 249 patients (60.2% male) with a median age at symptom onset of 54.2 years (range: 19.1-88.6 years). Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated a cumulative median time to recovery of 72 months, whereas median recovery timelines of those with documented recoveries were shorter (functional recovery = 307.5 days; 100% recovery = 400 days). Neither age nor sex impacted recovery timelines (log-rank P = .68 and P = 1.00, respectively).

CONCLUSION

Recovery from PTS was variable. Only 56 patients contributed recovery events to Kaplan-Meier analysis, reflecting the difficulties in ascertaining follow-up recovery data in a retrospective chart review. Neither age nor sex was associated with recovery time. These findings illustrate the demographics and range of recovery timelines observed in a large cohort while underscoring the need for prospective studies to define recovery with confidence.