“Appropriate” diagnostic testing: supporting diagnostics with evidence-based medicine and shared decision making

Background: Evidence-based medicine is an important approach to avoiding care that is unlikely to benefit patients in both the treatment and the diagnostic context. The medical evidence alone may not determine the most appropriate care decision. Patient interests are best served when the advantages and risks of a diagnostic test are viewed through the lens of the patient’s values. That is, the paradigm of evidence-based medicine should be complemented by the paradigm of shared decision making. Analysis Diagnostic testing may offer physiological and psychological benefits. Clinicians should also discuss the potential harms, however, which may be physiological (e.g. radiation or scarring), psychological (e.g. anxiety), and financial (e.g. cost-sharing burdens). All three of these concerns are compounded by the risk of false positives or incidental findings that are not serious, but which require decisions about further testing or treatment. Conclusion: We suggest that patient-centered decision making around diagnostic testing involves a two-step inquiry: Is the test medically appropriate? Does the available evidence documenting short- and long-term risk and benefits support the test for its intended use, given the patient’s characteristics and symptoms?Is the test appropriate for this patient? Has the provider initiated a conversation about tradeoffs that helps the patient evaluate whether the balance of risks and benefits is consonant with the patient’s own values and preferences? Potential benefits and harms to consider include the physiological, the psychological, and the financial

Decreasing Medical Complications for Total Knee Arthroplasty: Effect of Critical Pathways on Outcomes

BACKGROUND: Studies on critical pathway use have demonstrated decreased length of stay and cost without compromise in quality of care. However, pathway effectiveness is difficult to determine given methodological flaws, such as small or single center cohorts. We studied the effect of critical pathways on total knee replacement outcomes in a large population-based study. METHODS: We identified hospitals in four US states that performed total knee replacements. We sent a questionnaire to surgical administrators in these hospitals including items about critical pathway use and hospital characteristics potentially related to outcomes. Patient data were obtained from Medicare claims, including demographics, comorbidities, 90-day postoperative complications and length of hospital stay. The principal outcome measure was the risk of having one or more postoperative complications. RESULTS: Two hundred ninety five hospitals (73%) responded to the questionnaire, with 201 reporting the use of critical pathways. 9,157 Medicare beneficiaries underwent TKR in these hospitals with a mean age of 74 years (± 5.8). After adjusting for both patient and hospital related variables, patients in hospitals with pathways were 32% less likely to have a postoperative complication compared to patients in hospitals without pathways (OR 0.68, 95% CI 0.50-0.92). Patients managed on a critical pathway had an average length of stay 0.5 days (95% CI 0.3-0.6) shorter than patients not managed on a pathway. CONCLUSION: Medicare patients undergoing total knee replacement surgery in hospitals that used critical pathways had fewer postoperative complications than patients in hospitals without pathways, even after adjusting for patient and hospital related factors. This study has helped to establish that critical pathway use is associated with lower rates of postoperative mortality and complications following total knee replacement after adjusting for measured variables

Differences in Self-Reported Health in the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) and Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES-III)

Objective: To assess self-reported health status (SRHS) in two cohorts of participants with radiographic knee osteoarthritis (OA) and examine the extent that differences in SRHS are due to study design. Method: We used data from the Third National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES-III; population-based national survey) and the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI; prospective cohort study). Inclusion criteria for this analysis were age 60–79 and presence of radiographic knee OA. SRHS, elicited as a five-item domain (excellent, very good, good, fair, poor), was analyzed by dichotomizing the general health status measure as ‘‘fair/poor’ ’ versus all other states. We estimated the proportion of participants in fair/poor health from each study. Propensity score methodology was used to adjust for the differences in sampling strategies between the two studies. Results: Thirty-four percent (N = 1,608) of OAI and 29 % (N = 756) of NHANES-III participants satisfied inclusion criteria. The proportion in fair/poor health was higher in NHANES-III (28%) than in OAI (5%). After adjusting for the propensity score, the proportion in fair/poor health was four times higher in NHANES-III than in OAI. Conclusion: SRHS was substantially better in OAI than in NHANES-III. Self-selection bias may contribute to overestimation o

Treatment Failure Among Infected Periprosthetic Total Hip Arthroplasty Patients

Two-stage revision has been shown to be the most successful treatment in eradicating deep infection following total hiparthroplasty. We identified 62 patients treated by a two-stage revision. We defined “successful revision” as negative intraoperative cultures and no further infection-related procedure. We defined “eradication of infection” on the basis of negative cultures and clinical diagnosis at least one year after 2nd stage procedure. After a mean follow up of 2.7 years, eradication of the infection was documented in 91.1%, and a successful two-stage revision in 85.7% of patients. We observed no association between higher pre-reimplantation levels of ESR and C-reactive protein and lower likelihood of successful two-stage revision. We found an association between a history of another previous infected prosthetic joint and a failed 2nd stage procedure. Failure to achieve eradication of infection and successful two-stage revision occurs infrequently. Patients with prior history of a previous prosthetic joint infection are at higher risk of failure

Presence and Extent of Severe Facet Joint Osteoarthritis Are Associated with Back Pain in Older Adults

Objective To determine whether the presence and extent of severe lumbar facet joint osteoarthritis (OA) are associated with back pain in older adults, accounting for disc height narrowing and other covariates. Design Two hundred and fifty-two older adults from the Framingham Offspring Cohort (mean age 67 years) were studied. Participants received standardized computed tomography (CT) assessments of lumbar facet joint OA and disc height narrowing at the L2–S1 interspaces using four-grade semi-quantitative scales. Severe facet joint OA was defined according to the presence and/or degree of joint space narrowing, osteophytosis, articular process hypertrophy, articular erosions, subchondral cysts, and intraarticular vacuum phenomenon. Severe disc height narrowing was defined as marked narrowing with endplates almost in contact. Back pain was defined as participant report of pain on most days or all days in the past 12 months. We used multivariable logistic regression to examine associations between severe facet joint OA and back pain, adjusting for key covariates including disc height narrowing, sociodemographics, anthropometrics, and health factors. Results Severe facet joint OA was more common in participants with back pain than those without (63.2% vs 46.7%; P = 0.03). In multivariable analyses, presence of any severe facet joint OA remained significantly associated with back pain (odds ratio (OR) 2.15 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.13–4.08]). Each additional joint with severe OA conferred greater odds of back pain [OR per joint 1.20 (95% CI 1.02–1.41)]. Conclusions The presence and extent of severe facet joint OA on CT imaging are associated with back pain in community-based older adults, independent of sociodemographics, health factors, and disc height narrowing

Quantitative Assessment of Abdominal Aortic Calcification and Disk Height Loss: The Framingham Study

Abstract Background context Vascular disease has been proposed as a risk factor for disc height loss (DHL). Purpose To examine the relationship between quantitative measures of abdominal aortic calcifications (AACs) as a marker of vascular disease, and DHL, on computed tomography (CT). Study design Cross-sectional study in a community-based population. Patient sample Four hundred thirty-five participants from the Framingham Heart Study. Outcome measures Quantitative AAC scores assessed by CT were grouped as tertiles of “no” (reference), “low,” and “high” calcification. Disc height loss was evaluated on CT reformations using a four-grade scale. For analytic purposes, DHL was dichotomized as moderate DHL of at least one level at L2–S1 versus less than moderate or no DHL. Methods We examined the association of AAC and DHL using logistic regression before and after adjusting for cardiovascular risk factors and before and after adjusting for age, sex, and body mass index (BMI). Results In crude analyses, low AAC (odds ratio [OR], 2.05 [1.27–3.30]; p=.003) and high AAC (OR, 2.24 [1.38–3.62]; p=.001) were strongly associated with DHL, when compared with the reference group of no AAC. Diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, and smoking were not associated with DHL and did not attenuate the observed relationship between AAC and DHL. Adjustment for age, sex, and BMI markedly attenuated the associations between DHL and low AAC (OR, 1.20 [0.69–2.09]; p=.51) and high AAC (OR, 0.74 [0.36–1.53]; p=.42). Conclusions Abdominal aortic calcification was associated with DHL in this community-based population. This relationship was independent of cardiovascular risk factors. However, the association of AAC with DHL was explained by the effects of age, sex, and BMI

Reliability of medical record abstraction by non-physicians for orthopedic research

Background: Medical record review (MRR) is one of the most commonly used research methods in clinical studies because it provides rich clinical detail. However, because MRR involves subjective interpretation of information found in the medical record, it is critically important to understand the reproducibility of data obtained from MRR. Furthermore, because medical record review is both technically demanding and time intensive, it is important to establish whether trained research staff with no clinical training can abstract medical records reliably. Methods: We assessed the reliability of abstraction of medical record information in a sample of patients who underwent total knee replacement (TKR) at a referral center. An orthopedic surgeon instructed two research coordinators (RCs) in the abstraction of inpatient medical records and operative notes for patients undergoing primary TKR. The two RCs and the surgeon each independently reviewed 75 patients’ records and one RC reviewed the records twice. Agreement was assessed using the proportion of items on which reviewers agreed and the kappa statistic. Results: The kappa for agreement between the surgeon and each RC ranged from 0.59 to 1 for one RC and 0.49 to 1 for the other; the percent agreement ranged from 82% to 100% for one RC and 70% to 100% for the other. The repeated abstractions by the same RC showed high intra-rater agreement, with kappas ranging from 0.66 to 1 and percent agreement ranging from 97% to 100%. Inter-rater agreement between the two RCs was moderate with kappa ranging from 0.49 to 1 and percent agreement ranging from 76% to 100%. Conclusion: The MRR method used in this study showed excellent reliability for abstraction of information that had low technical complexity and moderate to good reliability for information that had greater complexity. Overall, these findings support the use of non-surgeons to abstract surgical data from operative notes