Self-care dependency assessment of person with lower limb amputation: an exploratory study.

Small convenience sample of 40 patients from a single hospital service in northern Portugal, so the results may not generalise. Participants were selected because they lived at home and already received family assistance with activities of daily living, and independent people were excluded, so the study does not describe amputees who manage alone. It was cross-sectional and descriptive, so it cannot show that any intervention caused improvement. The sociodemographic questionnaire was developed for this study, and the paper does not report its validation. The cluster analysis is exploratory and based on a small sample, so the two clusters should be treated as descriptive groupings rather than stable patient types.

Do not read the dependency scores as evidence that a specific rehabilitation treatment will restore independence. This was an observational assessment of 40 home-dwelling amputees who already needed family help, so it describes need, not treatment effect.