European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society
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To evaluate the feasibility and clinical improvement of a total posterior arthroplasty system in the surgical management of lumbar degenerative spondylolisthesis and or spinal stenosis. ⋯ In patients with spinal stenosis and degenerative spondylolisthesis, decompression and posterior arthroplasty with the TOPS System can maintain clinical improvement and radiologic stability over time.
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Clinical treatment of spinal metastasis is gaining in complexity while the underlying biology remains unknown. Insufficient biological understanding is due to a lack of suitable experimental animal models. Intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM1) has been implicated in metastasis formation. Its role in spinal metastasis remains unclear. It was the aim to generate a reliable spinal metastasis model in mice and to investigate metastasis formation under ICAM1 depletion. ⋯ Applying a reliable animal model for spinal metastasis, ICAM1 depletion reduces spinal metastasis formation due to an organ-unspecific reduction of metastasis development.
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Although surgeries have been performed for the treatment of lumbar disc herniation (LDH) or lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS), not all patients who undergo surgery are satisfied with the outcome. Electrodiagnostic study (EDX) can assess the physiological functions of nerve roots with higher specificity and relate better with clinical manifestations. The purpose of this study was to examine how EDX can predict surgical outcomes in patients with LDH and LSS and to compare the predicted values of EDX with other clinical factors and MRI findings. ⋯ EDX detected functional abnormalities of nerve roots that did not show clinical manifestation and did not appear compressed on MRI. These abnormalities are important predictive factors for surgical outcomes in patients with LDH or LSS. Therefore, pre-operative EDX is a clinically useful method to predict surgical prognosis.
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The preoperative identification of lumbar foraminal stenosis (LSFS) is important because a lack of recognition of this clinical entity is often associated with failed back surgery syndrome. Although magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used, and is considered by many as an appropriate tool for studying spine pathologies, there is limited data to suggest that MRI examinations are sufficiently sensitive or specific for the diagnosis of LSFS. There is a paucity of literature on the diagnostic performance of the combination of conventional diagnostic imaging methods. The purpose of this study is to determine the characteristics of conventional diagnostic imaging for symptomatic lumbar foraminal stenosis. ⋯ Our study demonstrates combination of conventional imaging techniques, to improve the detection of symptomatic foraminal stenosis.