Table 1.
Patient’s overall characteristics at baseline.
Table 2.
ACDF population divided by surgical approach.
Table 3.
Patient-reported outcomes - NDI, PCS, MCS and VAS – at baseline and 1 year post-surgery, and change in outcome scores.
Table 4.
MCID threshold values for PCS, MCS, NDI, and VAS patient-reported outcome scores.
Figure 1.
ROC curve plots comparing all four patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures collected in our dataset: NDI, VAS, PCS and MCS.
All calculations were performed using the Health Transition Item of the SF-36 (HTI) as an anchor. (A) ROC curves comparing PCS and VAS PROs. The area under the curve for PCS and VAS, respectively, is 0.94 and 0.63. (B) ROC curves comparing NDI and MCS PROs. The area under the curve for NDI and MCS, respectively, is 0.67 and 0.57. Abbreviations: NDI, Neck Disability Index; PCS, Physical Component Summary of the Short Form of the SF-36; MCS, Mental Component Summary of the Short Form of the SF-36; VAS, Visual Analog Scale; ROC, Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve.
Figure 2.
Mean baseline and 1-year PRO scores from patients undergoing surgery for anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) and their respective MCID threshold values.
(A) NDI, (B) VAS, (C) PCS PRO measures demonstrated patients’ clinically meaningful and statistically significant improvement 1 year post-surgery. (D) MCS values did not vary significantly. On average, all patients presented high MCS values (very good mental condition) at baseline and 1 year post-surgery. The overall mean change scores were: NDI −14.41±12.09 (p<0.001), VAS −3.34±2.67 (p<0.001), PCS 7.23±9.01 (p<0.01) and MCS 0,38±0.02 (p: 0.85). The MCID threshold score for each PRO measure was: NDI 15.85, VAS 1.95, PCS 42.54 and MCS 53.55. HTI was chosen as the anchor for the calculation of the MCID threshold values. MDC represents the chosen anchor-based approach. Abbreviations: NDI, Neck Disability Index; PCS, Physical Component Summary of the Short Form of the SF-36; MCS, Mental Component Summary of the Short Form of the SF-36; VAS, Visual Analog Scale; MCID, Minimum Clinically Important Difference; PRO, Patient-Reported Outcome; **, p<0.01; ***, p<0.001.