The spine journal : official journal of the North American Spine Society
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Lumbar axial back pain arising from degenerative disc disease continues to be a challenging clinical problem whether treated with nonsurgical management, local injection, or motion segment stabilization and fusion. ⋯ Ablation of the BVN for the treatment of chronic lumbar back pain significantly improves patients' self-reported outcome early in the follow-up period; the improvement persisted throughout the 1-year study period.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Psychometric properties of the 30-m walking test in patients with degenerative cervical myelopathy: results from two prospective multicenter cohort studies.
The timed 30-m walking test (30MWT) is used in clinical practice and in research to objectively quantify gait impairment. The psychometric properties of 30MWT have not yet been rigorously evaluated. ⋯ The 30MWT shows high test-retest reliability and good divergent and convergent validity. It is responsive to change only in patients with more severe myelopathy. The 30MWT is a simple, quick, and affordable test, and should be used as an ancillary test to evaluate gait parameters in patients with DCM.
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Lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) can hinder a patient's physical activity, which in turn can impair glucose tolerance and body weight regulation in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM-2). Therefore, successful lumbar surgery could facilitate glycemic control and body weight regulation. ⋯ The present study demonstrates that in patients with DM-2 and LSS, successful lumbar surgery may facilitate glycemic control by enabling an increase in the patient's level of physical activity. Additionally, it could help reduce body weight in overweight (BMI>25) patients with DM-2 and LSS.
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Obesity is commonly investigated as a potential risk factor for low back pain (LBP); however, current evidence remains unclear. Limitations in previous studies may explain the inconsistent results in the field, such as the use of a cross sectional design, limitations in the measures used to assess obesity (eg, body mass index-BMI), and poor adjustment for confounders (eg, genetics and physical activity). ⋯ After 2 to 4 years, obesity-related measures did not increase the risk of developing chronic LBP or care-seeking for LBP with or without adjustment for familial factors such as genetics in Spanish adults.
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Comparative Study
Biochemical validity of imaging techniques (X-ray, MRI, and dGEMRIC) in degenerative disc disease of the human cervical spine-an in vivo study.
On a molecular level, maturation or degeneration of human intervertebral disc is among others expressed by the content of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). According to the degenerative status, the disc content can differ in nucleus pulposus (NP) and annulus fibrosus (AF), respectively. Research in this area was conducted mostly on postmortem samples. Although several radiological classification systems exist, none includes biochemical features. Therefore, we focused our in vivo study on a widely spread and less expensive imaging technique for the cervical spine and the correlation of radiological patterns to biochemical equivalents in the intervertebral discs. ⋯ The GAG content in human cervical discs can be detected in vivo and is subject to a significantly (p<.05) region-specific pattern (AF vs. NP; anterior vs. posterior in the AF). Up to the levels of AF and NP, this is reproducible in MRI in dGEMRIC technique, but not in X-ray or standard MRI sequences. Potentially, the MRI in dGEMRIC technique can be used as a non-invasive in vivo indicator for disc degeneration in the cervical spine.