Single Assessment Numeric Evaluation Correlates with American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Score for Common Elbow Pathology: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

Abstract

There are currently a variety of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) for elbow pathology, without any established gold standard. The Single Assessment Numeric Evaluation (SANE) is a single question assessment of the patient's perceived overall function compared with normal. The SANE score has been correlated with PROs from the shoulder and knee literature. To correlate the SANE score for a variety of elbow pathologies with a traditionally reported elbow outcome measure, the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons-Elbow score (ASES-E). Cohort study (diagnosis); Level of evidence, 3. A retrospective review was performed of all patients identified at a single center between April 2016 and January 2019 who presented as a new patient with elbow pathology. All patients prospectively completed the ASES-E along with the SANE score for elbow (SANE-E) at the time of initial consultation. Spearman correlations (<i>r</i>) were performed to evaluate the correlation between the ASES-E and the SANE-E score for specific elbow pathology, along with descriptive data such as age, sex, and chronicity of the problem. A total of 555 patients (166 women, 29.9%) with a mean ± SD age of 51.0 ± 11.7 years with the diagnoses of medial epicondylitis (n = 72; 13.0%), lateral epicondylitis (n = 224; 40.4%), biceps tendon rupture (n = 139; 25.0%), triceps tendon rupture (n = 21; 3.8%), and elbow arthritis (n = 99; 17.8%) were included in this analysis. There was moderate correlation between the SANE-E and the ASES-E (<i>r</i> = 0.623; <i>P</i> < .001), with strongest correlation with the visual analog scale (VAS) (<i>r</i> = -0.518; <i>P</i> < .001) compared with any individual question and moderate to strong correlations based on specific diagnoses. SANE-E and ASES-E scores for the entire cohort were 42.9 ± 26.7 and 56.9 ± 21.4, respectively (<i>P</i> < .001). Age (<i>r</i> = 0.027; <i>P</i> = .526), sex (<i>r</i> = 0.026; <i>P</i> = .555), VAS (<i>r</i> = -0.106; <i>P</i> = .013), and chronicity of the problem (<i>r</i> = -0.037; <i>P</i> = .384) were not found to be correlated with differences in ASES-E and SANE-E. The SANE-E score is a simple way to assess patient-perceived function relative to normal. The findings of this study demonstrated moderate to strong correlation between the ASES-E and the SANE-E score for a variety of commonly encountered elbow conditions.