The professor of the Department of Orthopedics, Rheumatology and Traumatology of the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM) at Unicamp Sérgio Piedade was awarded the ISAKOS Research Grant Winners, 2021-2023 edition, with the project “Four-Domain Patient-Reported Outcomes Software”. The professor will receive a US$15 grant from the International Society of Arthroscopy, Knee Surgery and Orthopedic Sports Medicine (ISAKOS, in the acronym in English).
The scholarship is included in the “countries with limited resources” category, according to the division defined by the World Health Organization (WHO). In this category, the subsidy is granted every two years to two projects with scientific merit. According to Isakos, the aim of the program is to provide its members with resources to fund the highest quality international research in arthroscopy, knee surgery and orthopedic sports medicine. The project has a deadline of 18 months to be executed.
“I would like to thank Isakos for the financial support for our 4-Domain Sports PROM software research project,” said Piedade, who was previously president of the entity's Sports Medicine Committee. The acronym PROM comes from English (“Patient reported outcome measures”, in Portuguese) and is a personalized questionnaire on orthopedic sports medicine, in which the patient reports the treatment received.
“We started in 2017 with a systematic review in sports medicine, checking whether there was a universal questionnaire designed for this area. In the first stage, we verified that there was a gap, the lack of a PROM questionnaire to evaluate postoperative results and the physical and psychological demands of high-performance athletes and individuals who play sports regularly. In the second stage, we developed a specific questionnaire for this, the first of its kind in the literature, which was validated and published in English. In the third stage, software will be developed for clinical application, carrying out the assessment taking into account the four pillars established in the questionnaire, in different languages.”
According to Piedade, the objectives of the software are: to improve the clinical applicability of the PROM questionnaire, creating a reproducible tool to accurately evaluate athletes and high-performance sports practitioners who received treatment due to a sports injury; optimize data collection regarding recorded perception of injury, treatment expectations, assessment of post-operative care, treatment received and outcomes compared to physical demand; group and analyze athletes according to sport modality, anatomical location of the injury and type of surgical procedure to plot graphs, compare and analyze results through cell phones, computers and tablets and, ultimately, lead to advances in treatment.
4-Domain Sports PROM
The questionnaire consists of four pillars: 1) athlete without injury; 2) injured athlete; 3) what is expected from the treatment; and 4) what is evaluated about the treatment. Each pillar has two questions, which are answered with a score from 0 (very poor) to 10 (excellent). Furthermore, the questionnaire presents three additional questions about the activity pattern reported by the athlete – level of competition, motivation brought by practice and physical demand. “The questionnaire is universal in the sense that it is not restricted to one joint of the body or one sport, as is the case in other models,” said Piedade.
The 4-Domain Sports PROM It was also translated and adapted into Portuguese in André Toledo's professional master's thesis, supervised by Professor Piedade, in the Postgraduate Program in Science Applied to Medical Qualification at FCM. The questionnaire is also being validated in Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish.
Exercise and Sports Medicine
In parallel with the development of the questionnaire, FCM's Exercise and Sports Medicine research line produced four publications related to the subject in the period:
Presently PROMSs are not tailored for athletes and high-performance sports practitioners: A systematic review (2019)
PROMS in Sports Medicine (2019)
Validation and implementation of 4-domain Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) tailored for Orthopedic Sports Medicine (2020)
Patient-Reported Outcomes Tailored to Sports Medicine (2021)
Article originally published on the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM) website.
