Abstract
AIMS: Children with cerebral palsy often have severe spasticity leading to deformity that requires multiple orthopedic surgeries. Intrathecal baclofen pump implantation effectively decreases severe spasticity. The objective of this study was to determine whether children who have a baclofen pump implanted at a young age have fewer orthopedic surgeries than those who have a baclofen pump implanted at later ages.
METHODS: In this retrospective study of 310 children, we compared occurrence of surgery in relation to having or not having the baclofen pump, by using survival analysis with surgery as the outcome, presence of baclofen pump as the exposure of interest, modeled as a time-dependent variable, and age as the time scale.
RESULTS: There was no significant effect of pump placement on overall surgery frequency. Analyses by type of surgery showed that those without a pump in place had a 64% lower hazard of scoliosis surgery.
CONCLUSIONS: No evidence was found to indicate that children who have a baclofen pump implanted at a young age have fewer orthopedic surgeries than those who have a baclofen pump implanted at later ages.