Study design: Prospective, cross-sectional study.
Objective: To determine Scoliosis Research Society (SRS)-30 health-related quality of life (HRQOL) reference values by age and gender in an adult population unaffected by scoliosis thereby allowing clinicians and investigators to compare individual and/or groups of spinal deformity patients to their generational peers.
Summary of background data: Normative data are collected to establish means and standard deviations of health-related quality of life outcomes representative of a population. The SRS HRQOL questionnaire has become the standard for determining and comparing treatment outcomes in spinal deformity practices. With the establishment of adult SRS-30 HRQOL population values, clinicians, and investigators now have a reference for interpretation of individual scores and/or the scores of subgroups of adult patients with spinal deformities.
Methods: The SRS-30 HRQOL was issued prospectively to 1346 adult volunteers recruited from across the United States. Volunteers self-reported no history of scoliosis or prior spine surgery. Domain medians, means, confidence intervals, percentiles, and minimum/maximum values were calculated for six generational age-gender groups: male/female; 20-39, 40-59, and 60-80 years of age.
Results: Median and mean domain values ranged from 4.1 to 4.6 for all age-gender groups. The older the age-gender group, the lower (worse) the reported domain median and mean scores. The only exception was the mental health domain scores in the female groups which improved slightly. Males reported higher (better) scores than females but only the younger males were significantly higher in all domains than their female counterparts. In addition, all male groups reported higher Mental Health domain scores than their female counterparts (P=0.003).
Conclusion: This study reports population medians, means, standard deviations, percentiles, and confidence intervals for the domains of the SRS-30 HRQOL instrument. Clinicians must be mindful of age-gender differences when assessing deformity populations. Generational decreases noted in the older adult volunteer scores may provide a basis for future investigators to interpret observed score decreases in patient cohorts at long-term follow-up.