Influence of Patient Demographics on the Outcomes of Arthroplasty: Race, Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Insurance

Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) and total hip arthroplasty (THA) are among the most frequent surgeries in the orthopedics and represent the most frequent joint replacement (JR) procedure. Indeed, they have been proven to be effective in terms of quality of life (QoL) improvement in symptomatic osteoarthritis [1, 2]. However, some patients still report bad outcomes. For this reason, orthopedic surgeons try to identify the factors that are related to outcomes and may cause worse outcomes. However, most of these studies focus on the anatomic or radiological aspects, surgical technique, or patient comorbidities. Some other studies focus on prosthetic engineering, rehabilitation, and infection prevention. On the other hand, the social aspects, economic status, or income have been less studied. Moreover, race and gender are two factors that may influence prosthetic outcomes for various reasons, the so-called “biological” influence and the “social” influence. That is, the nonmodifiable vs. the modifiable factors.