Patients with depression may still be candidates for elective lumbar spine surgery
Patients with depression still experience significant improvement from elective lumbar spine surgery despite higher levels of preoperative pain and functional limitations compared with nondepressed patients, published results showed.
Gemma Vilà-Canet, MD, PhD, of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and colleagues performed a prospective observational study including 78 patients without depression and 19 patients with depression who underwent elective lumbar spine surgery for a degenerative lumbar condition. Outcome measures included preoperative pain, depression (determined using the Zung self-rating depression scale), Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), visual analog scale (VAS) and patient satisfaction, according to the study.
The researchers noted depressed patients had higher levels of preoperative lumbar pain (P = .0) and functional limitation (P = .01) compared with nondepressed patients. At 1-year follow-up, depressed patients still showed higher levels of radicular pain (P = .029) and functional limitation (P = .03) compared with nondepressed patients; however, the overall improvement of pain and function was similar between the groups. Additionally, 70.6% of depressed patients and 80.3% of nondepressed patients were satisfied with surgery at 1 year.
“The main finding of this study is that depressed and nondepressed patients improve similarly when a surgery for a degenerative lumbar condition is performed,” the researchers wrote. “Satisfaction levels with the procedure were found to be similar in both groups, so the initial hypothesis is confirmed,” they concluded.
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