Scar location related to patient and parent satisfaction with scoliosis surgery

Adolescents undergoing scoliosis surgery and their parents expressed sometimes different preferences in surgical scar site in a recent study, leading British investigators to suggest involving both groups in the presurgical decision-making process.

Phil Sell, FRCS, of the Department of Orthopaedics, University Hospitals of Leicester, England, presented the results at the 2010 Annual Congress of the Spine Society of Europe (EuroSpine 2010), held in Vienna.

He described the responses of 28 patients, the majority girls, and their parents to standard outcome instruments — the Scoliosis Research Society 20 (SRS20) questionnaire, which assesses body shape, and the Walter Reed Visual Assessment Scale — during structured preoperative interviews the investigators conducted. Parents and patients also graded on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 as unsatisfactory and 10 as satisfactory, nine photos of four anterior and five posterior scoliosis surgery scars, prior to indicating their preferences for ultimate scar location.

Patient characteristics included a 57· average Cobb angle and an age range of 12 to 17 years old. Their parents’ mean age was 45 years.

Most patients preferred the posterior approach and a posterior postoperative scar. “The parents had a slightly different opinion about scars. They were a bit more ambivalent.” Sell said, adding there was no significant difference in how both groups rated the scars.

“There was no scar preference except for this preference for posterior only,” he said during the conclusion of the presentation.

All patients scored the scar photographs about the same in terms of being satisfactory or unsatisfactory and parents and patients had fairly similar scores on the four domains of the SRS20 domains, based on the data in the abstract.

One-fourth of patients had no preference for scar location. After Sell and colleagues took the male patients’ data out of the analysis, the results remained the same, he noted.

For more information:

Sell P, Quereshi A, Sell B. A prospective evaluation of surgical scar location with correlation to SRS 20 and other body shape instruments. Paper #47. Presented at EuroSpine 2010. Sept. 15-17, 2010. Vienna.

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