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Background & Objective: Ingrowing toe nail disease is caused by excessive lateral nail growth in to the nail fold. Because of high incidence of this disease and high percentage of recurrence after routine treatments, we decided to compare the matricectomy with phenol %88 with electrocoagulation.
Methods: This research was an clinical trial study that have been done on 30 patients with bilateral ingrowing toe nail disease who referred to the Dermatology clinic in the Ardabil Imam Khomeini Hospital, from October 2005 to September 2006. In each case, phenol %88
matricectomy used on one side of affected zone and lectrocoagulation used on the other side.
The data was collected with questionnaire and the time for follow up patients was six months. Collected data analyzed by SPSS, chi square and fisher exact test.
Results: Average age of patients was 24.56±5.40 years old, ratio of female to male was 3 to 2 and in all patients affected site was the big toe. Most of the patients were in primary level of education (%33.3), 18 (60%) patients had secondary infection, 8 (26.7%) patients had
abscess, 13 (43.3%) patients have granulation tissue and no cases of onychomycosis were detected. Recovery period with phenol was 2-4 weeks and recurrence or side effect were not seen. Regarding the recovery duration these two therapeutic methods had significant
statistical differences only during the second fortnight (p=0.001). But there was no significant statistical difference in recurrence period and side effects.
Conclusion: Matricectomy with phenol %88 had less recovery time than electrocoagulation.