Return to Work After Lumbar Endoscopic Spinal Surgery in the United States.

Background context: Return to work (RTW) after spinal surgery is a crucial postoperative outcome influencing patients' lives. Endoscopic spinal surgery (ESS) is an ultra-minimally invasive technique for the treatment of spinal pathology, and some ESS procedures have been shown to improve RTW dynamics following spinal surgery.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate RTW within ninety days following various lumbar ESS procedures in the United States (US) and compare differences in RTW between patient occupational activity levels and ESS procedural types.

Study design/setting: Prospectively collected data provided by patients via the SPINEHealthie mobile health application PATIENT SAMPLE: Patients with a status of employed who received lumbar ESS (n=192) OUTCOME MEASURES: Back pain, leg pain, ODI, and return to work after spine surgery METHODS: The SPINEHealthie project dataset was used for this study. The SPINEHealthie project is a multi-center, multi-surgeon prospectively collected dataset for endoscopic spine surgery in which patients utilize a mobile health application to report critical outcome measures. One hundred ninety-two patients met the inclusion criteria for this study. The primary outcome was patient reported time to RTW. Kaplan Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazard models were performed to analyze RTW after lumbar ESS.

Results: Average age was 52.0 years, and 59.4% of the sample were male. The cumulative incidence in RTW was 83.6% with a median of patients returning to work at or before 16.0 days after any type of lumbar ESS. Patients with labor-intensive occupations returned to work significantly later than patients with sedentary occupations (p=0.014). Surgical procedure was also associated with RTW (p=0.043); a median of patients returned to work at or before 13.0 days after interlaminar discectomy or unilateral decompression, 20.0 days after far lateral approaches for discectomy or decompression, and 40.0 days after interlaminar unilateral laminotomy for bilateral decompression.

Conclusions: Patients who received lumbar ESS return to work relatively rapidly compared to the literature on traditional open lumbar procedures. The type of ESS (as dictated by the underlying pathology), as well as patient occupational physical activity requirements impact postoperative RTW.