WEDNESDAY, April 7 (HealthDay News) -- Living environment may influence assessment results of the quality of life after surgery in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis patients, according to a study in the March 15 issue of Spine.
Chuanfeng Wang, M.D., and colleagues at the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, China, conducted a study of 117 postoperative adolescent idiopathic scoliosis patients, of whom 101 were female and 16 were male, and divided them into two groups according to whether they were from a rural or an urban area. All the patients completed a Chinese version of the Scoliosis Research Society (SRS)-22 scale.
Although both rural and urban patients had similar scores in terms of function/activity, pain and mental health, rural residents had lower satisfaction of management domain scores, while urban residents reported less satisfaction with self-image and appearance, the researchers discovered.
"Imbalances in social development in the developing world resulted in differences in the postoperative scores of the SRS-22 scale between the urban and rural adolescent idiopathic scoliosis patients," the authors write. "In clinical practice, in order to make the score of the SRS-22 scale more objective and comparable, the influences of the geographic factors, including differences between rural and urban populations, should be taken into account when the SRS-22 scale is used to assess the health-related quality of life in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis patients, especially in developing countries."
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