Clinical trials

In the last several decades, many Patient Reported Outcomes Measures (PROMs) have been developed to provide assessment of patient health across multiple domains, as they relate to various spine conditions. However, many of the available PROM surveys have many questions and require substantial time to complete and/or assess one focal domain of health requiring multiple tools to achieve an overall assessment of well-being. Thus, concerns have arisen regarding patient survey fatigue and data integrity. The Single Assessment Numeric Evaluation (SANE) is a single-question outcome measure that asks patients to rate their function, as it pertains to the area being treated, on a scale of 0 to 100. The SANE score has excellent acceptance in some orthopedic surgery research, where it has been shown responsiveness similar to more comprehensive legacy measures. The SANE thus eliminates survey fatigue and has been validated across a spectrum of orthopedic subspecialties. To our knowledge, however, the SANE has never been studied in a patient population undergoing any type of spinal surgery. Thus, we set out to compare the SANE score in patients undergoing lumbar discectomy to currently utilized PROM scores, including the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI), Zurich Claudication Scale (ZCS), and short form-36 (SF-36).

Problem: Postoperative wound infection following various spinal surgeries is a serious complication. The incidence of post-surgical wounds in spine surgery is high, and various researchers have reported different infection rates. In addition, increased healthcare costs, prolonged lengths of stay in hospital, and reduced quality of life as a result of surgical site infections (SSI) are also major concerns. Several methods for avoiding SSI, such as betadine irrigation, vacuum-assisted closure, and intra-wound vancomycin powder, have been used to reduce the rate of wound infection in spine surgery. Use of local vancomycin has been popular because of its protective effects and lower cost. According to some reports, prophylactic administration of intra-wound vancomycin powder before wound closure is an effective method for decreasing postoperative wound infection rates; however, other studies have revealed a non-significant effect of intra-wound vancomycin use for decreasing the postsurgical wound infection rate. Solution: Therefore, the investigators will prospectively randomize all various types of spinal surgeries to patients who will receive intrawound vancomycin powder and control group who will not receive the powder and to see it's effect in reducing the post-surgical infection.