ABSTRACT
The effective treatment of rheumatoid forefoot deformity and functional impairment in the arthritic patient continues to present a challenging problem. While follow-up studies of forefoot correction generally report acceptable surgical results, none to date has addressed the more rigorous and perhaps meaningful combination of clinical, radiological, and biomechanical outcomes. To more accurately assess the results of treatment and to compare treatments requires adequate measures of physical function and outcomes of interventions. Various clinical and radiographic measures of outcomes have been proposed. While valuable, these measures lack assessment of function in terms of quantitative motion (gait). This study combines three-dimensional (3D) gait metrics with radiographic and clinical assessment tools in order to investigate the correlation of these measures as they pertain to rheumatoid patients undergoing forefoot reconstruction.
