Emotions Can Affect Hip Surgery Recovery

The emotional state of a patient plays a significant role in his or her recovery from hip surgery, suggests a Saint Louis University study.

Orthopedic surgeons typically use two tests to determine if a patient has recovered from hip surgery: a clinical measure of hip function given by the doctor and a questionnaire answered by the patient.

We started out simply looking to see if the results of the two tests were correlated; the one doctors give has been used for decades to evaluate hip function, and the other that the patient answers is much newer, Dr. Berton Moed of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine said in a statement. What we found was surprising — the clinical test found good-to-excellent results, while the self-test taken by the same patients showed significantly worse recovery.

It appears that the way a person feels after hip surgery may have a lot to do with his or her emotional state, according to Moed.

Underlying depression and new depression brought on by the injury and/or surgery could be to blame for slowing a patient’s recovery, according to the study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.