Assessing Quality of Life in Patients with Lumbar Sciatica

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Sciatica, a very common and costly medical condition, describes a set of symptoms rather than a diagnosis, and it is difficult to find criteria for successful treatment. To evaluate success of surgery for lumbar degenerative disc, for example, one might repeat the radiological diagnostics and compare them with the preoperative findings, observe physiologic changes (eg, nerve conduction) or look for improvement in clinical findings (eg, weakness). But there is increasing doubt among clinicians that these traditional, objective measures of medical success present a valid and sufficient indication of outcomes from the patient's perspective. Of what worth are radiological findings if they do not sufficiently represent the patient's evaluation of the sciatic symptoms-either because the patient's subjective impairment is much greater than suggested by the radiological findings [1] or vice versa, the radiological findings show lumbar nerve compression but the patient's impairment is mild [2,3]? Objective measures do not always correlate with subjective experiences. To assess the functional impact of sciatica for patients more validly, quality-of-life (QoL) scores have been developed for use in research and clinical settings. The improvement in health-related QoL as measured by these scores can be seen as the main goal of sciatica treatment