The Challenges of Studying Pilonidal Surgery
At the Pilonidal Treatment Center of New Jersey (PTCNJ), we believe that successfully treating pilonidal disease is only part of the story. To truly evaluate whether a treatment is effective, robust data collection is essential.
As avid clinical researchers, the surgeons at PTCNJ have developed a comprehensive approach to collecting and maintaining patient outcomes data. Our program is designed to better understand how patients are doing during healing, recovery and beyond.
This is not always easy. Consider a patient who travels several hundred miles to PTCNJ for our minimally -invasive laser -based pilonidal cystectomy procedure. Their treatment is successful, they heal quickly, and they return to their normal life. Two years later, they remain completely symptom-free and, uderstandably, they may prefer to move on and no longer think about pilonidal disease.
From a patient’s perspective, this is a wonderful outcome. From a researcher’s perspective, however, documenting outcomes requires continued communication with patients who may no longer feel the need for ongoing medical care.
Through structured outreach and ongoing data collection, PTCNJ works to capture meaningful patient outcomes whenever possible. This includes monitoring for recurrent symptoms, the need for additional treatment, and other outcomes that help provide a more complete understanding of how a particular treatment performs.
To effectively study a given treatment approach for pilonidal disease, longterm follow-up of patients is mandatory to rule out recurrent disease. For traveling patients, telemedicine and high-quality digital images become key tools. As avid clinical researchers, the surgeons at the PTCNJ are cautious not to assume a successful outcome when we are unable to connect with a patient after a significant time period following a surgical intervention.
We have seen wonderful outcomes in our minimally-invasive program—some patients symptom-free for 2 years and more and with no visible scars! Yet, without a large cohort of patients with robust follow-up periods, our data yields only anecdotal information. We will not formally analyze the data set and write it up into a publishable format until the data set is adequately robust.
Finally, self-advocate! If a prospective surgeon quotes you an extremely high “success rate” for a proposed procedure, please reflexively ask for how long patients are followed after full healing is documented. Because we do so much revisional surgery at our Center, we have seen many cases in which the patient is discharged as a “success” once the surgical wound or wounds are fully healed..we know there is more to the story, potential longterm wound complications, recurrence and more.
