Top surgery encompasses surgical procedures that modify breast or chest tissue as part of gender-affirming care. Prior research suggests that top surgery can improve physical, psychological, and social well-being for transgender and gender-diverse individuals who desire these procedures. However, the existing evidence base is limited: many studies have been retrospective, have not consistently used validated outcome measures, and frequently excluded nonbinary people. These gaps reduce the robustness and generalizability of findings and motivate prospective study designs that include diverse gender identities.
The primary aim of this protocol is to examine changes in mental health, gender dysphoria, risky behaviors, and quality of life among trans people (including nonbinary individuals) undergoing top surgery. The study seeks to capture temporal changes by assessing participants before and after surgery using standardized questionnaires.
This is a longitudinal, prospective cohort study. Participants will be recruited from a single surgeon’s office located in Perth, Western Australia. The study employs repeated questionnaire-based assessments at defined perioperative intervals to evaluate trajectories of mental health, dysphoria/euphoria, behavior, and quality of life following top surgery.
Eligible participants are trans individuals aged 16 years and older who are scheduled to undergo top surgery with the recruiting surgeon. Recruitment takes place in the surgeon’s practice; further details on sampling approach, target sample size, or exclusion criteria were not reported in the available abstract.
Questionnaires administered in this study will collect the following domains as reported in the source abstract:
The abstract indicates additional measures (the text in the source was truncated), and therefore the full set of validated instruments and specific scale names were not reported in the available record. The investigators emphasize the use of structured questionnaires to address prior limitations related to nonvalidated outcome assessment in retrospective studies.
Participants complete questionnaires at three specified time points:
This schedule is intended to capture both early postoperative changes and sustained effects at one year. The abstract does not provide further information on procedures for data management, retention strategies, or handling of missing data; those methodological details were not reported in the available source text.
The protocol explicitly addresses known limitations of prior literature by using a prospective design and including nonbinary participants. However, the published abstract available in the provided source is truncated and omits several methodological specifics. Reported gaps in the available text include:
Where the available source text was incomplete, this rewrite states that those details were not reported rather than inferring or inventing them.
This protocol describes a prospective cohort study designed to assess perioperative and 1-year outcomes after top surgery in trans and nonbinary people, focusing on mental health, gender dysphoria, risky behaviors, and quality of life. The study aims to address limitations of earlier retrospective research by applying a longitudinal design and including broader gender-diverse populations. The publicly available abstract is truncated and does not report full methodological details such as sample size, specific validated instruments, or analytic plans.