Patient-reported questionnaires to preoperatively identify high-risk surgical patients.

Abstract

Purpose: Low cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) increases the risk of postoperative morbidity and mortality following major surgery. Assessing CRF preoperatively, by measuring peak oxygen uptake (VO_2peak) during cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET), is valuable yet not widely available. This study aimed to assess whether questionnaires could be used preoperatively to identify high-risk surgical patients.

Methods: Healthy participants and patients who underwent CPET completed the FitMáx, Duke Activity Status Index (DASI), the modified 4-questions DASI (M-DASI-4Q), Veterans-Specific Activity Questionnaire (VSAQ), and Metabolic Equivalents of Task (MET) questionnaire. Questionnaire-VO_2peak was compared with CPET-VO_2peak. Overall performance of the questionnaires was assessed by the area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Furthermore, corresponding to the Youden index or pre-specified levels, sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values were determined.

Results: In total, 361 participants were included. All questionnaires showed high AUC values to identify high-risk patients, defined on the basis of CPET-VO_2peak thresholds. FitMáx and VSAQ demonstrated superior results compared to the other questionnaires. Based on the Youden index, the optimal questionnaire-VO_2peak cut-off values were 20.6, 21.3, and 26.1 ml·kg^-1·min^-1 for the FitMáx and 16.3, 18.2, and 20.4 ml·kg^-1·min^-1 for the VSAQ corresponding to the VO_2peak thresholds 16.0, 18.2 and 24.5 ml·kg^-1·min^-1 respectively.

Conclusion: The ability to identify high-risk surgical patients preoperatively (defined by the CPET-VO_2peak thresholds) by the FitMáx and the VSAQ indicates that they could be used to identify high-risk surgical patients. Patients with a poor predicted VO_2peak ≤ 21.3 and ≤ 18.2 ml·kg^-1·min^-1, respectively for FitMáx and VSAQ, should be referred to formal preoperative (cardiopulmonary) exercise testing.

Trial registration: The study was registered as NL-OMON23304 in the Overview of Medical Research in the Netherlands, retrospectively at 28-04-2020.