• Alexander O Aguirre, Mohamed A R Soliman, Cathleen C Kuo, Nicco Ruggiero, Justin Im, Asham Khan, Jaims Lim, Elizabeth Nyabuto, David E Smolar, Jeffrey P Mullin, and John Pollina.
• Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA.
• World Neurosurg. 2024 Mar 1; 183: e321e327e321-e327.

ObjectiveCommon complications after spinal fusion, such as pseudoarthrosis, cage subsidence, or instrumentation failure, are affected by patients' bone quality. The cervical-vertebral bone quality (C-VBQ) score, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based adaption of the lumbar vertebral bone quality (VBQ) score, was developed by 3 separate research groups simultaneously to evaluate bone quality in cervical spinal fusion patients. We present the first analysis comparing these scoring methods to the well-validated VBQ score.MethodsA retrospective analysis of data for consecutive patients who underwent spine surgery at a single institution was completed. The VBQ score was calculated using the Ehresman et al.MethodThe C-VBQ scores, named according to placement of the region of interest within the cerebral spinal fluid, were calculated separately using the methods of Soliman et al. (C2-VBQ), Razzouk et al. (C5-VBQ), and Huang et al. (T1-VBQ). Linear regression models were utilized to evaluate correlations to the VBQ score.ResultsA total of 105 patients were identified (mean age, 57.0 ± 11.9 years; women, 50.5%). Mean scores were C2-VBQ, 2.37 ± 0.55; C5-VBQ, 2.36 ± 0.61; and T1-VBQ, 2.64 ± 0.68. The C-VBQ scores for the C2 level were significantly higher than those for the C3-C6 levels (3.18 ± 0.96 vs. 2.63 ± 0.77, P < 0.001), whereas the C7 level was found to have significantly lower C-VBQ scores (2.42 ± 0.78 vs. 2.63 ± 0.77, P = 0.04). The C2-VBQ (r = 0.63) score had the strongest correlation to the VBQ score, compared to C5-VBQ (r = 0.41) and T1-VBQ (r = 0.43) (P < 0.001).ConclusionsThis study demonstrates that the C2-VBQ had the strongest correlation to the lumbar VBQ score among all C-VBQ scores.Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier Inc.

18 keywords...

hide…