Acta orthopaedica
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Background and purpose - Total hip arthroplasty (THA) is performed mainly because of pain. To evaluate the result after surgery, different questionnaires measuring the patient-reported outcome regarding quality of life are used. Forgotten Joint Score (FJS), designed to chart postoperative symptoms, was developed to find subtle differences between patients who report that their operated hip is "very good" or "excellent." We evaluated whether FJS provides additional information compared with the Oxford Hip Score (OHS) and ceiling and floor effects with use of these instruments. ⋯ FJS items had a high internal consistency (Cronbach's a = 0.93) and reproducibility (Pearson correlation = 0.87, ICC = 0.93); 92 patients answered on 2 distributions of the FJS questionnaires, 19 patients had identical answers. Interpretation - OHS had a larger ceiling effect than FJS, which could indicate that FJS is a more fine-tuned instrument to separate patients with good to excellent outcome after THA. The high internal consistency of FJS indicates that the items of the instrument consistently cover the construct of joint awareness.
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Background and purpose - Socioeconomic status is associated with the outcome of major surgery. We investigated the association of socioeconomic status with the risk of early mortality and readmissions after primary total hip arthroplasty (THA). Patients and methods - We obtained information on income, education, immigration, and cohabiting status as well as comorbidities of 166,076 patients who underwent primary THA due to primary osteoarthritis (OA) from the Swedish Hip Arthroplasty Register, the Swedish National Inpatient Register and Statistics Sweden. ⋯ However, adjusting for socioeconomic confounders in multivariable models only marginally influenced the predictive ability of the models, as expressed by their area under the curve. Interpretation - Income and level of education are strongly associated with early mortality and readmissions after primary THA, and both parameters are closely connected to health status. Since adjustment for socioeconomic confounders only marginally improved the predictive ability of multivariable regression models our findings indicate that comorbidities may under certain circumstances serve as an acceptable proxy measure of socioeconomic background.