The cientificWorldJOURNAL Clinical Study An Evaluation of the Responsiveness and Discriminant Validity of Shoulder Questionnaires among Patients Receiving Surgical Correction of Shoulder Instability

Copyright © 2012 Kyle A. R. Kemp et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Health-related quality-of-life (HRQL) measures must detect clinically important changes over time and between different patient subgroups. Forty-three patients (32M, 13 F; mean age = 26.00 ± 8.19 years) undergoing arthroscopic Bankart repair completed three validated shoulder questionnaires (Western Ontario Shoulder Instability index (WOSI), American Shoulder and Elbow Sur-geons Standardized Shoulder Assessment form (ASES), Constant score) preoperatively, and at 6, 12, and 24 months postoper-atively. Responsiveness and discriminant validity was assessed between those with a satisfactory outcome and those with (1) a major recurrence of instability, (2) a single episode of subluxation, (3) any postoperative episode of instability. Eight (20%) patients reported recurrent instability. Compared to baseline, the WOSI detected improvement at the 6- (P < 0.001) and 12-month (P = 0.011) evaluations. The ASES showed improvement at 6 months (P = 0.003), while the Constant score did not report significant improvement until 12 months postoperatively (P = 0.001). Only the WOSI detected differential shoulder functio