Spine
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Interrupted time series. ⋯ Health status of people with whiplash improved after legislative change. Design of compensation schemes should be undertaken with the understanding that the scheme structure may have substantial effects on the long-term health of injured people.
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A consecutive series of 22 giant cell tumor (GCTs) of the cervical spine which underwent surgical treatment was observed from 1990-2003. ⋯ GCT of the cervical spine easily onsets between 20 and 40 years of age. As a kind of benign but local aggressive or low potential malignancy tumor, we should take an aggressive attitude to excise the tumor as much as possible while reserving the neural function as a precondition. Unlike in the thoracic and lumbar spine, a strictly "en bloc" resection is often not a feasible option because of the involvement of critical neurovascular structures. Total spondylectomy (even intralesional) with radiation therapy as an adjunctive treatment has significantly lowered the local recurrence rate of the GCT in the special segments.
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Retrospective case-control. ⋯ Postoperative infection after the surgical treatment of idiopathic scoliosis can successfully be treated with irrigation and debridement, instrumentation removal, and a course of antibiotics. Although less curve correction was achieved in the infected group, there were no differences in patient-reported outcomes when compared with the noninfected group.
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Disc tissue was removed at surgery from 9 patients with discogenic pain and 9 deformity patients with scoliosis undergoing anterior and posterior spinal fusion. These samples were then analyzed using ex vivo proton high resolution magic angle spinning (HR-MAS) NMR spectroscopy to produce metabolic profiles for comparison between the 2 patient groups. ⋯ Our results suggest that spectroscopic markers of proteoglycan, collagen, and lactate may serve as metabolic markers of discogenic back pain. These results provide a further basis of the potential to develop in vivo MR spectroscopy for the investigation of discogenic back pain.