Spinal Disorders: Fundamentals of Diagnosis and Treatment Part 114. Spinal disorders are among the most common medical conditions with significant impact on health related quality of life, use of health care resources and socio-economic costs. Spinal surgery is still one of the fastest growing areas in clinical medicine. | Outcome Assessment in Spinal Surgery Chapter 40 1135 ing further items in one of the core dimensions without necessarily expanding the whole questionnaire and therefore increasing the effort for respondents and analysts. Mannion et al. 99 evaluated a modified German version of the standardized short core-measure tool proposed by Deyo and found it to be simple practical reliable and valid. Cronbach s alpha internal consistency for each core measure was between and . Composing an index from all the core measures Cronbach s alpha increased to . Test-retest reliability was moderate to excellent. There were floor and ceiling effects notable in the function domain whereas the disability dimension showed floor effects at follow-up. The correlations between the single items and their corresponding reference questionnaire were . The Sensitivity to Change was a little bit lower than in the reference questionnaires. Recently White et al. 155 adapted the Deyo core questions to the neck pain setting and tested them on 104 patients. This first evaluation demonstrated a good repeatability and validity with absent floor or ceiling effects. These promising findings provide motivation for further research because the standardized use of such an instrument in future clinical trials would improve outcome assessment. It would improve the comparability between clinical studies and therefore build a better basis for treatment improvements in spinal surgery. Recapitulation For the evaluation of spinal interventions self-administered assessment tools are widely used. An instrument must be comparable translated into and validated for the corresponding language and must embrace at least pain disability health-related quality of life and work status. For more thorough investigations psychosocial aspects work-related parameters and fear avoidance behavior should additionally be assessed. For these purposes an array of well validated standardized questionnaires are .
