What Are the Minimally Important Changes of Four Commonly Used Patient-Reported Outcome Measures for 36 Hand and Wrist Condition-Treatment Combinations?

CONCLUSION: MICs vary between condition-treatment combinations and differ depending on the invasiveness of the intervention. Patients receiving a more invasive treatment have higher treatment expectations, may experience more discomfort from their treatment, or may feel that the investment of undergoing a more invasive treatment should yield greater improvement, leading to a different perception of what constitutes a beneficial treatment effect.CLINICAL RELEVANCE: Our findings indicate that the MIC is context-specific and may be misleading if applied inappropriately. Implementation of these condition-specific and treatment-specific MICs in clinical research allows for a better study design and to achieve more accurate treatment evaluations. Consequently, this could aid clinicians in better informing patients about the expected treatment results and facilitate shared decision-making in clinical practice. Future studies may focus on adaptive techniques to achieve individualized MICs, which may ultimately aid clinicians in selecting the optimal treatment for individual patients.PMID:34962496 | DOI:10.1097/CORR.0000000000002094

Source: Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research - December 28, 2021 Category: Orthopaedics Authors: Lisa Hoogendam Jaimy Emerentiana Koopman Yara Eline van Kooij Reinier Feitz Caroline Anna Hundepool Chao Zhou Harm Pieter Slijper Ruud Willem Selles Robbert Maarten Wouters , the Hand-Wrist Study Group Source Type: research