Multi‐Institutional Comparison of Quality of Life Between Open Versus Endoscopic Skull Base Approaches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Objectives The primary objective of this prospective review was to compare quality of life between patients undergoing endoscopic and open skull base approaches. Study Type and Design Prospective Review. Methods Five centers recruited consecutive patients treated surgically for skull base neoplasms between 2012 to 2018. The Skull Base Inventory (SBI), Anterior Skull Base (ASB), and Sinonasal Outcome Test (SNOT‐22) were administered up to 12 months post‐operatively. Mean change from baseline scores were compared with univariable and multivariable analyses. Results A total of 180 patients were included: 108 (60%) F and 72 (40%) M, of whom 126 (70%) underwent endoscopic and 54 (30%) underwent open approaches. Patients undergoing endoscopic approaches were more likely to have sellar or clival pathology (68 vs. 15%, p < 0.001). Those undergoing endoscopic approaches had better disease‐specific quality of life at one year using the SBI and ASB (mean change from baseline = 7.2 vs. 0.69, p = 0.004; 5.8 vs. −1.1, p = 0.002), respectively. On multivariable analysis, endoscopic approach was associated with greater improvement in overall quality of life (mean difference in change scores from baseline = 6.5, p = 0.009), as well as endocrine (mean difference = 8.3, p = 0.011), neurologic (mean difference = 8.3, p = 0.012), visual (mean difference = 7.9; p = 0.032), financial (mean difference = 9.7, p = 0.03), and spiritual domain scores (mean difference = 4.0, p = 0.035). Subgroup analyses of pituitary and non‐pituitary histopathologies demonstrated trends towards greater quality of life at 1‐year compared to baseline in the endoscopic approach compared to the open group. Conclusions Endoscopic approaches are associated with better quality of life compared to open approaches. However, baseline differences in histopathology between the group limit the direct comparison of the open and endoscopic approaches. Future studies with larger and more homogenous samples are required. Level of Evidence Level IV evidence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".