An Analysis of Pre- and Post-Operative Patient Reported Outcome Measurements Following Elective Foot and Ankle Surgery
Authors: McMillen Tucker , Bakaes Yianni , Jackson J. Benjamin , Myers Paisley , Hurley Deborah M. , Gonzalez Tyler 
Published: December 2023

Category: Ankle; Bunion Introduction/Purpose: Using patient-reported outcomes (PRO) to predict which patients may or may not improve from orthopaedic surgery could be valuable for clinical decision making. The Patient Reported Outcome Instrumentation System (PROMIS) utilizes computerized adaptive testing based on item response theory to decrease administration time while maintaining accuracy. However, the data on the relationship between pre- and post-operative PROMIS scores for elective foot and ankle surgical patients and their ultimate PROs is limited, and the literature is conflicting. The purpose of this study is to assess preoperative PROMIS mobility, physical function (PF), and pain interference (PI) scores to determine their accuracy in predicting patient reported surgery success or failure, and to estimate preoperative score domains associated with patient reported surgery success. Methods: A retrospective chart review was used to identify a cohort of adult patients who underwent operative treatment for at least one foot or ankle surgery between 05/01/2020 – 06/01/2022. Descriptive statistics were calculated to describe the study population, clinical factors, PROMIS scores, and outcomes. Bivariate analyses were performed to assess potential associations between PROMIS score differences with other factors, and PROMIS score differences within levels of other factors. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess potential associations with patient-rated surgery success or failure with patient, clinical, and outcomes data. Significance was determined by associated p-values (p < 0.05). Results: We found that preoperative PROMIS scores for mobility, PF, and PI were not significantly associated with patient-rated surgery success (p=0.092, 0.666, 0.869, respectively). Similarly, in a regression to identify individual factors that influenced patient reported surgical failure, preoperative mobility, PF, and PI scores were all not significant (p=0.095, 0.663, 0.626, respectively). However, preoperative cut-points based on 95% confidence intervals for means were estimated locally to determine the probability of optimal patient reported surgery success, and threshold scores for mobility, PF, and PI were chosen as ≥39, ≥47, and ≤55, respectively. We also found that the only preoperative patient factors that showed higher odds of patient reported surgical failure in a multivariate logistic regression model were age of 50-64 (p=0.004) and diabetes (p=0.006). Conclusion: Our study found no significant associations between preoperative PROMIS scores and patient reported success or failure for foot and ankle surgery. This may be encouraging to surgeons when considering that even patients with seemingly unfavorable preoperative scores have a similar chance as other patients for surgical success and improvement from the patient’s perspective. Additionally, identifying optimal patient PROMIS scores for surgery success can provide an ideal baseline score cutoff for surgeons for comparison when assessing an individual’s chances of surgical success for foot and ankle surgery. However, further study is needed to investigate the clinical utility of these estimates.