The Influence of Pain and Resiliency on Foot and Ankle Surgery Outcomes

BACKGROUND: Resilience is the ability to recover after stressful events and has been shown to correlate with surgical outcomes. However, there has been minimal research on the impact of patient resiliency on foot and ankle surgical outcomes. This study aims to determine the predictive value of preoperative resiliency scores on surgical outcomes and investigate how this compares with the predictive value of pain scores. METHODS: We conducted a retrospective review of adult patients who completed a preoperative Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) and underwent surgery between November 2019 and November 2020 with a fellowship-trained foot and ankle surgeon (N=184). Data included demographics, comorbidities, surgical details, complication and reoperation rates, pre- and postoperative opioid and benzodiazepine use, and additional patient-reported outcome measures (ie, visual analog scale [VAS], Pain Catastrophizing Scale [PCS], Pain Disability Index [PDI], Foot and Ankle Outcome Score [FAOS] pain subscale). Mean follow-up duration was 4.49 (range, 1.10-14.17) months. RESULTS: BRS weakly correlated with decreased postoperative benzodiazepine use (P=.007). PCS magnification (P=.050) and helplessness (P=.047) subscales weakly correlated with increased follow-up duration. PDI total score and most subscores significantly correlated with an increase in at least 1 of the following: follow-up duration, or postoperative opioid or benzodiazepine use. Neither the VAS nor FAOS pain subscore correlated with any outcome. PDI total score was the strongest predictor of postoperative opioid (β=0.334) and benzodiazepine (β=0.315) use. Preoperative opioid users had significantly higher PDI total score (user=39.3, nonuser=24.9; P=.012) and subscores (ie, social activity, sexual behavior, self-care, life-support activities). CONCLUSION: BRS is an unreliable tool for predicting outcomes in foot and ankle surgery, as it only weakly correlated with decreased benzodiazepine use. Rather, given the PDI’s strong associations with postoperative measures in this study, physicians should consider the value of preoperative PDI completion when predicting how foot and ankle surgery recipients will fare postoperatively. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level III, retrospective cohort study.