Predictors of improvement in quality of life at 12-month follow-up in patients undergoing anterior endoscopic skull base surgery

Background Patients with pituitary lesions experience decrements in quality of life (QoL) and treatment aims to arrest or improve QoL decline. Objective To detect associations with QoL in trans-nasal endoscopic skull base surgery patients and train supervised learning classifiers to predict QoL improvement at 12 months. Methods A supervised learning analysis of a prospective multi-institutional dataset (451 patients) was conducted. QoL was measured using the anterior skull base surgery questionnaire (ASBS). Factors associated with QoL at baseline and at 12-month follow-up were identified using multivariate logistic regression. Multiple supervised learning models were trained to predict postoperative QoL improvement with five-fold cross-validation. Results ASBS at 12-month follow-up was significantly higher (132.19,SD = 24.87) than preoperative ASBS (121.87,SD = 25.72,pConclusion It was possible to predict postoperative positive change in QoL at 12-month follow-up using perioperative data. Further development and implementation of these models may facilitate improvements in informed consent, treatment decision-making and patient QoL.