Recovery from hip and knee arthroplasty: Patients' perspective on pain, function, quality of life, and well-being up to 6 months postoperatively.
OBJECTIVE
To provide a more detailed description from patients' perspectives than is yet available of recovery from hip and knee arthroplasty and to use this information to test 2 assumptions about recovery from these procedures: that recovery from knee arthroplasty, as assessed by patients, routinely reaches the level achieved by hip arthroplasty; and that fatigue is prolonged after major orthopedic surgery.


METHODS
A cohort study.


METHODS
University teaching hospitals.


METHODS
Consecutive patients undergoing hip (n = 107) or knee (n = 53) arthroplasty.


METHODS
Unilateral hip or knee arthroplasty.


METHODS
Standardized self-rated measurements of pain, function, quality of life, and well-being from preoperatively to 6 months follow-up.


RESULTS
Pain and function improved significantly less after knee arthroplasty than after hip arthroplasty, but the 2 procedures led to similar improvements in life evaluation, mood, and subjective health. Fatigue was only transiently increased.


CONCLUSIONS
The findings were inconsistent with both assumptions. Nevertheless, despite poorer recovery in pain and function, patients receiving knee arthroplasty felt that life had improved as much as did patients with hip arthroplasty. Detailed information about how major joint arthroplasty in routine practice affects patients' lives can be used to advise patients and clinicians and can invalidate influential, but inaccurate, assumptions.
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. psalmon@liv.ac.uk
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P
Salmon
G M
GM
Hall
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D
Peerbhoy
A
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Shenkin
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C
Parker
D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D019644:Arthroplasty, Replacement, Hip / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D019645:Arthroplasty, Replacement, Knee / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D015331:Cohort Studies; D005221:Fatigue; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010147:Pain Measurement; D010149:Postoperative Pain; D011788:Quality of Life