Category: General Spine
Negative effects of smoking, workers’ compensation, and litigation on pain/disability scores for spine patients.
This study is a retrospective review of two institutions that collected patient information from 2000 to 2008. 13,704 consecutive patients with spinal disorder complaints answered questions regarding smoking status, ODI, VAS and litigation or workers compensation status. No other information was collected. There is no followup to these patients. The overall demographic data breaks […]
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Healthy lifestyle behavior and risk of long duration troublesome neck pain or low back pain among men and women: results from the Stockholm Public Health Cohort.
This Karolinska Institute of Stockholm study utilized the Stockholm Public Health Cohort. The Stockholm County Council established public health surveys of the Swedish population and has participants filled in baseline questions that addressed various aspects of health, lifestyle and social outcomes. The authors used data sets from respondents from 2006, between the ages of 18 […]
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The influence of obesity on the outcome of treatment of lumbar disc herniation: analysis of the Spine Patient Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT).
This publication by Rihn et al represents a retrospective analysis of data collected from the Spine Patient Outcomes Research Trial (SPORT). As has been previously published describing the SPORT trial, participants were either randomized or placed in an observational cohort. This data presented was taken from the as-treated analysis and therefore the randomization effect was […]
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The Effects of Smoking and Smoking Cessation on Spine Surgery: A Systematic Review of the Literature.
This systematic review by Jackson and Devine provides us with a current review of the literature in regards to the effects of smoking and smoking cessation on spine surgery. While this review covers spine surgery in general, our reviewed focused solely on the effects related to cervical disc surgery. There are several potential risks that […]
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The Norwegian Cervical Arthroplasty Trial (NORCAT): 2-year clinical outcome after single-level cervical arthroplasty versus fusion-a prospective, single-blinded, randomized, controlled multicenter study.
This investigation by Sundseth et al presents a prospective randomized study comparing cervical anterior discectomy and fusion (using interbody cage) versus cervical disc arthroplasty in a Norwegian population. Outcomes were determined at 2 years, which is a relatively short time period. Outcome measures included the Neck Disability Index (NDI), SF36, and EuroQol-5D-3L. Overall, this multicenter […]
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The Neck Disability Index: a study of reliability and validity.
The Neck Disability Index (NDI) was developed by Vernon and Mior in the late 1980’s and published in 1991. It remains the most widely used outcome instrument for the assessment of patients with neck related disorders. The NDI was developed to provide an objective measure to assess activities of daily living (ADL) in patients with […]
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What level of pain are patients happy to live with after surgery for lumbar degenerative disorders?
This study by Fekete et al, which has been approved for publication in The Spine Journal, provided an alternative approach to evaluating clinical outcomes in patients with degenerative lumbar disorders. The study population was derived from a spine surgery outcomes database and EUROSPINE Spine Tango Registry. Over 6900 patients in the database met the inclusion […]
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Iliac crest bone graft harvest donor site morbidity. A statistical evaluation.
This paper published in 1995 is a case series of 261 patients that have had either posterior or anterior iliac crest harvesting for spinal fusion. With current utilization of bone graft substitutes including bone marrow aspiration and BMP, many of the more recently trained spine surgeons may not have had the experience of dealing with complications and […]
