Health state utility in patients with osteoarthritis of the hip and total hip arthroplasty.

Understanding patients' perceived health status, as measured by health state utility, is important when evaluating the societal impact of hip osteoarthritis (OA) and total hip arthroplasty (THA). The purpose of this study was to measure health state utility in patients with hip OA and THA. A total of 231 patients from 2 institutions were enrolled into 1 of 6 cohorts: chronic hip OA, successful and failed primary THA, successful and failed revision THA, and infected THA. Average health state utilities were calculated using the time-trade-off method. Health state utilities were highest for primary THA (0.96) and lowest for infected THA (0.46). Our data demonstrate that THA results in substantial improvement in perceived health status in patients with chronic hip OA. However, health state utility is significantly worse after revision THA than primary THA, and failed primary or revision THA results in substantially reduced health state utility, similar to or worse than chronic OA.