The study shows that postoperative rehabilitation can be safely implemented during the first 3 months after lumbar fusion and should include measures to modify psychological as well as motor functions.

Presurgery physiotherapy decreases pain, risk of avoidance behavior, and worsening of psychological well-being, and improves quality of life and physical activity levels before surgery compared with waiting-list controls. These results were maintained only for activity levelspost surgery. Still, presurgery selection, content, dosage of exercises, and importance of being active in a presurgery physiotherapy intervention is of interest to study further to improve long-term outcome.

Prediction studies testing a thorough range of psychological variables in addition to demographic, workrelated and clinical variables are lacking in lumbar fusion surgery research. This prospective cohort study aimed at examining predictions of functional disability, back pain and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) 2-3 years after lumbar fusion by regressing nonlinear relations in a multivariate predictive model of pre-surgical variables. Before and 2-3 years after lumbar fusion surgery, patients completed measures investigating demographics, work-related variables, clinical variables, functional self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, fear of movement/(re)injury, mental health and pain coping. Categorical regression with optimal scaling transformation, elastic net regularization and bootstrapping were used to investigate predictor variables and address predictive model validity. The most parsimonious and stable subset of pre-surgical predictor variables explained 41.6, 36.0 and 25.6% of the variance in functional disability, back pain intensity and HRQOL 2-3 years after lumbar fusion. Pre-surgical control over pain significantly predicted functional disability and HRQOL. Pre-surgical catastrophizing and leg pain intensity significantly predicted functional disability and back pain while the pre-surgical straight leg raise significantly predicted back pain. Postoperative psychomotor therapy also significantly predicted functional disability while pre-surgical outcome expectations significantly predicted HRQOL. For the median dichotomised classification of functional disability, back pain intensity and HRQOL levels 2-3 years post-surgery, the discriminative ability of the prediction models was of good quality. The results demonstrate the importance of pre-surgical psychological factors, leg pain intensity, straight leg raise and postoperative psychomotor therapy in the predictions of functional disability, back pain and HRQOL-related outcomes.

Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) is a common surgical intervention for radiculopathy resulting from degenerative cervical spine conditions. Post-surgical cervical collar use is believed to reduce post-operative pain, provide the patient with a sense of security during activities of daily living and even reduce rates of non-fusion. This prospective randomized controlled pilot trial investigates trial design feasibility in relation to prospective physical, functional, and quality of life-related outcomes of patients undergoing ACDF with interbody cage, with (n = 17) and without (n = 16) post-operative cervical collar usage. Results show that the sample provides sufficient statistical power to show that the use of a rigid cervical collar during 6 post-operative weeks is associated with significantly lower levels of neck disability index after 6 weeks and significantly lower levels of prospective neck pain. To investigate causal quality of life or fusion rate outcomes, sample size needs to be increased at least fourfold and optimally sixfold when accounting for data loss in prospective follow-up. The study suggests that post-surgical cervical collar usage may help certain patients cope with initial post-operative pain and disability.