LAUSR

To the Editor: We read with great interest the article of Rullander, Lundström, Östlund, and Lindh (2017) in a recent issue of the journal. The authors performed a mixed-methods study to evaluate postsurgical pain in adolescents after scoliosis surgery and highlighted areas of potential improvement in perioperative scoliosis care in terms of nursing support and pain management. The authors should be congratulated for performing a well-designed study in an important topic (e.g., acute pain) in patients undergoing orthopaedic surgical procedures ( Harbell et al., 2016 ; Quinlan et al., 2017) . If patients at high risk for poor postoperative pain control can be identifi ed, effective multimodal analgesic strategies may be tailored to improve postoperative pain for these patients ( Sakae, Marchioro, SchuelterTrevisol, & Trevisol, 2017 ; Vora, Nicholas, Kassel, & Grant, 2016) . Although the study of Rullander et al. (2017) was well conducted, there are some questions regarding the study that need to be clarifi ed in order to confi rm the authors’ fi ndings. First, it is unclear whether the authors standardized the intraoperative and postoperative analgesic regimens for these patients, as this can signifi cantly alter the studied outcomes. Second, the authors reported a high patient dropout rate and the observed clinical differences between patients who remained in the study and patients who dropped out of the study suggests that the authors’ results are likely not generalizable and more likely