Surgery Improves Quality of Life in Vertebral Osteomyelitis

Surgical treatment of vertebral osteomyelitis (VO) can lead to significantly improved quality of life (QoL), researchers recently found.

There has been scant study of outcomes related to surgery among patients with VO. Therefore, for this study, the researchers sought to determine whether patients with VO who had surgery show improvement in quality of life and reduction in mortality 2 years postoperatively.

The team followed patients with VO from the time of surgical treatment in a tertiary referral hospital from 2008 to 2015. They collected prospective patient and quality-of-life data both prior to surgery and at years 1 and 2 after surgery using validated outcome scores.

Of the 195 patients with VO who were surgically treated, the researchers accessed quality-of-life data from 136 patients before surgery, from 100 patients 1 year after surgery, and from 82 patients 2 years post-surgery.

They found that mortality rates at 1 year were 20% and at 2 years were 23%. The quality-of-life outcome scores indicated significant improvement at 1 year post-surgery and did not change significantly from year 1 to year 2.

“Surgical treatment of VO patients leads to significantly improved [quality of life],” the researchers concluded. “Nevertheless, [quality of life] levels were below those of the general population. Our results underscore that spine disability questionnaires measuring [quality of life] are mandatory to demonstrate comprehensively the severity of this entity. Our study confirms a high mortality, and points out the role of VO as a potentially life-threatening condition.”

—Rebecca Mashaw

Reference:

Yagdiran A, Otto-Lambertz C, Lingscheid KM, et al. Quality of life and mortality after surgical treatment for vertebral osteomyelitis (VO): a prospective study. Eur Spine J. Published online July 1, 2020. doi:10.1007/s00586-020-06519-z