The Single Assessment Numeric Evaluation (SANE): Is a Reliable Metric to Measure Clinically Significant Improvements After Lumbar Discectomy

Background/Rational: In the last several decades, many Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs) have been developed to provide assessment of patient health across multiple domains, as they relate to various spine conditions. When considered in concert, these instruments quantify and stratify an individual's health state before and after surgery and can be utilized to perform research as well as inform clinical practice. However, many of the available PROM surveys have many questions and require substantial time to complete and/or assess one focal domain of health requiring multiple tools to achieve an overall assessment of well-being. Thus, concerns have arisen regarding patient survey fatigue and data integrity. Ideally, a PROM would provide sufficient information to define health status longitudinally, while requiring the least amount of time and effort to complete. The current approach to PROMs in spine surgery research has been mostly to require an assessment of pain, disease specific disability and general health, requiring answers for up to of 40 unique questions, despite efforts to shorten the questionnaires in other neurosurgery and orthopedics disciplines.

The Single Assessment Numeric Evaluation (SANE) score is one such example of a limited question survey that aims to assess multiple domains. The SANE is a single-question outcome measure that asks patients to rate their function, as it pertains to the area being treated, on a scale of 0 to 100. The SANE score has excellent acceptance in some orthopedic surgery research, where it has been shown responsiveness similar to more comprehensive legacy measures. The SANE thus eliminates survey fatigue and has been validated across a spectrum of orthopedic subspecialties. To our knowledge, however, the SANE has never been studied in a patient population undergoing any type of spinal surgery. Thus, we set out to compare the SANE score in patients undergoing lumbar discectomy to currently utilized PROM scores, including the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), Zurich Claudication Scale (ZCS), and short form-36 (SF-36).

Design: Survey research design, prospective outcomes measure validation study.

Objectives: We hypothesized that the SANE score would correlate strongly and demonstrate similar magnitudes of longitudinal responsiveness with the more lengthy and burdensome legacy PROMs used in spine surgery research today.

Primary Objective: To correlate and confirm that SANE score to the more lengthy and burdensome legacy PROMs used in spine surgery research today.