Abstract

Background: Lumbar degenerative spine diseases are mainly a consequence of physiologic aging and are a major cause chronic disability. The best measurement of treatment quality in these diseases should be the patient's opinion of the results using patient-reported outcomes (PRO) instruments. EuroQol 5 Dimensions is increasingly used in spinal research and as an outcome measure in spinal surgery. We assessed the quality of life in patients in the preoperative period and following surgical treatment by using EuroQol 5 Dimensions (EQ5D).
Methods: A study of assessment of quality of life was done in the pre-operative period and post-operatively at the time of discharge, at 1 month, 6 months and 1year interval by making use of the EQ-5D in 60 patients of lumbar degenerative spine disease.
Results: Most of the patients were in the age group of 58-70 (56.6%) and there were almost equal number of males (53.3%) & females (46.7%) in the study. Most of patients in the study were having preoperative EuroQol 5D values in the range of 0.036-0.156 (55%). Preoperative EuroQol 5D values (mean=0.23) improved at discharge (mean=0.51) and throughout the follow up period at 1month (mean=0.60), at 6 months (mean=0.76) and 1 year (mean=0.96).
Conclusions: All the patients showed improvement in their assessment scores for Euroqol 5Dimensions throughout the follow up period and were satisfied with the results. This study also proved that Euroqol 5D is a good tool to assess the quality of life in patients with lumbar degenerative spine disease undergoing surgical treatment. The use of this outcome instrument gives us a platform to predict a positive and accurate outcome after surgery in the long term.

Key words: Lumbar degenerative spine disease, Quality of life, Euroqol 5D, Outcome measure