Perioperative Predictors of Early Spinal Cord Stimulator Removal: A Retrospective Cohort Study

Background: Spinal cord stimulators can offer an effective treatment in chronic pain refractory to conventional medical management. However, with a failure rate of up to 44% and an annual explantation rate of 6–9%, there is a need to better identify patients at high risk for therapeutic failure. The objective of this retrospective cohort study was to determine predictors of early SCS explantation following device placement. Methods: The Medical Informatics Operating room Vitals and Events Repository database was queried for patients with a spinal cord stimulator and at least two years of follow-up (n = 56). A multivariate logistic regression was fitted. Recursive factor elimination with cross-validation and L1 penalization were used to reduce the number of predictors and minimize the risk of overfitting. The model was used to predict risk factors for explantation, odds ratio (OR), 95% confidence interval (CI), and false discovery rate-adjusted p-value. Results: The final model displayed adequate performance with an average precision of 0.769. Sleep disorders were identified as a statistically significant predictor of SCS explantation (OR: 3.88, CI: 1.36–11.04, FDR p-value: 0.0497). Conclusions: While further prospective studies are needed, our study indicates that sleep disorders are a risk factor for spinal cord stimulator explantation and should be considered during pre-operative evaluation.