Award-Winning Ideas Changing the Future of Spine Surgery | IMAST 2026 Award Winners | Scoliosis Dialogues

And, uh, Ferran, we're gonna start with you.

Great.

Uh, thanks very much for the invite and for the introduction.

Um, I'm Ferran Pellicer, as was mentioned by Grant.

I'm a spine surgeon based in Barcelona, and I'll be presenting a paper which was conceived and prepared by Susana Nunez-Pereira.

So here's a summary of what we presented.

Uh, the goal of our paper was trying to characterize the spectrum of health-related quality of life in surgical idiopathic scoliosis across the lifespan using the SRS-22 questionnaire.

And for that purpose, we, uh, included in our study all the patients from the ESSG database older than ten years that had been operated because of idiopathic scoliosis.

At the end, we had s- seven hundred and sixty-one patients, eighty-five of them being females, properly distributed in all the decades from ten years of age up to eighty years of age.

So the findings that we got, uh, are to understanding, uh, relevant.

So what we could see is that, uh, these patients, uh, when they are-- they are all operated approximately in all ages with curves of sixty degree of magnitude.

But importantly, during the first four decades, the thoracic curves predominate, and after the fourth decade, the lumbar curves then predominate.

And when this happens, we also is associated to changes in the sagittal plane alignment.

So originally, the curves operated during the first three until the fourth decade, they have a normal sagittal alignment, and the patients that we operate after the fourth decade progressively are having a deterioration in the sagittal alignment in terms of increased or positive sagittal balance.

So this is clearly showing what happens when degenerative changes appear to be more relevant in this idiopathic scoliosis population.

In terms of quality of life, the patient's-- the domain that is always most impacted is self-image, both in the very young and also in the very adult.

There's nothing that deteriorates more self-image than a, a deformed trunk when you are older.

But at the same time, when patients get older after the fourth decade, pain and function also deteriorate.

The most important thing that we found, which is good, is that idiopathic scoliosis had a very sweet spot where complications are very rare, and this is before the age of thirty, thirty-five, where complications are below five percent.

But after that, complications get growing.

So it's a simultaneous thing that happens is as aging and degeneration appears and invades the spine, complications are also clearly increasing to become a very relevant problem when we operate patients in the seventh decade above sixty years with rate of reinterventions which are thirty percent approximately.

The SRS improvement is quite evident always in all the lifespan, and there is a clear improvement of self-image at all ages, and pain is improved and function is improved when it is clearly impaired before surgery.

And finally, satisfaction is quite high, uh, a four point five in the SRS, uh, twenty-two score, uh, all over and homogeneously in all the lifespan.

So these are, uh, the main findings.

And if I had to just provide some, a take-home message, I would say that clearly this is the first study assessing the health-related quality of life spectrum of surgical idiopathic scoliosis across the lifespan.