CORR Insights^®: What Clinimetric Evidence Exists for Using Hip-specific Patient-reported Outcome Measures in Pediatric Hip Impingement?

Excerpt

The use of patient-reported outcome measures to evaluate orthopaedic intervention is gaining popularity among orthopaedic surgeons. This upswing in acceptance is due to the discordance between traditional outcomes, such as joint ROM or alignment of bone and those reported by patients. The newer metrics can expand our understanding of what treatment success really means, and expand our understanding of how interventions work, since their answers come from a key vantage point: That of the patient. Broadly, there are two groups: Generic and specific patient-based measures. The former quantify a patient’s perception of his or her general health state, and as such, often are less sensitive to changes related to a specific orthopaedic disorder. Specific measures are either joint/disease-specific or region-specific. They are commonly used in orthopaedics because of their ability to detect focused types of change or departures from normality. The consequences of hip impingement can be measured at the hip level and (perhaps more meaningfully) globally, including activities of daily living, of leisure, or at the work place. As for the latter, the impact of hip impingement will differ between children and adults because of the differing nature and frequency of activities in each group. Outcome measures developed for adults therefore are not automatically applicable to children and adolescents; careful consideration should be given to which measures can be used in evaluating children with hip impingement. …