PhD Defence Daan Geerards

Keywords: Plastic surgery, patient-reported outcome measures, body contouring
 

"Patient-Reported Outcome Measures in Body Contouring Surgery"

Many patients struggle with excess skin after significant weight loss, often due to bariatric surgery. For this patient group, body contouring surgery can provide a solution. To assess quality of life and treatment success, a suitable patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) is needed. 

This dissertation focuses on the development of PROMs for patients after major weight loss. It then utilizes the BODY-Q to demonstrate improvements in quality of life following an abdominoplasty, lower body lift, and lower body lift with thigh lift. Finally, a method called computerized adaptive testing is developed and tested for the BODY-Q and CLEFT-Q. This approach significantly reduces the number of questions in a PROM while maintaining the questionnaire’s precision. 

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