Does bunion surgery actually narrow the foot? Assessment of outcomes of surgery using traditional angles and a new radiographic measure of severity- the forefoot: hindfoot ratio. Correlation with clinical outcomes

Background Various angles have been used to grade the severity of hallux valgus deformity. They are useful in surgical planning but do not correlate with symptom severity or improvement. We feel that there is a fundamental mismatch between the width of the forefoot and the width of the hindfoot and that this is more clinically relevant, we describe two techniques for measuring this. We aim to measure the degree of foot narrowing after surgery and moreover how this correlates to the severity of preand post operative outcomes.