Articles: back-pain.
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J Spinal Disord Tech · Mar 2016
Radiographic Restoration of Sagittal Spinopelvic Alignment After Posterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion in Degenerative Spondylolisthesis.
A retrospective study. ⋯ Surgical correction of degenerative spondylolisthesis with posterior lumbar interbody fusion and posterior instrumentation resulted in relief of back pain, which may be associated with improvement of sagittal spinopelvic alignment. Surgeons should consider deformity parameters, especially the SA, in the surgical treatment of degenerative spondylolisthesis.
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Comparative Study
What is the Correlation Between Facet Joint Radiofrequency Outcome and Response to Comparative Medial Branch Blocks?
Facet joint pain is a common cause of low back pain. There are no physical exam findings that provide a reliable diagnosis. Diagnosis is made by medial branch block injections (MBB). Once the source of pain has been determined, radiofrequency neurotomy (RFN) can be performed. Previous studies have shown that RFN reduces level of pain and improves function. No study has tried to correlate MBB results with outcomes after RFN. ⋯ Patients had improved disability scores and decreased pain after RFN. No correlation was seen between results on MBB and pain relief after RFN. It is still unclear how many medial branch blocks are needed and the criteria for MBB results before proceeding to RFN.
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Case Reports
Intrathecal Clonidine Pump Failure Causing Acute Withdrawal Syndrome With 'Stress-Induced' Cardiomyopathy.
Clonidine is a central alpha(2)-agonist antihypertensive used widely for opioid/alcohol withdrawal, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and chronic pain management. We describe a case of clonidine withdrawal causing life-threatening hypertensive crisis and stress-induced cardiomyopathy. A 47-year-old man with chronic back pain, treated with clonidine for many years via intrathecal pump (550 mcg/24 h), presented following a collapse and complaining of sudden worsening of back pain, severe headache, diaphoresis, nausea and vomiting. ⋯ The intrathecal pump was removed. We report a case of stress-induced cardiomyopathy resulting from the sudden cessation of long-term intrathecal clonidine. This was managed by re-institution of clonidine and targeted organ-specific therapies.
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The prognostic ability of the STarT Back Tool (SBT) reportedly varies, but the factors affecting this are unclear. This study investigated the influences of care setting (chiropractic, GP, physiotherapy, spine centre), episode duration (0-2, 3-4, 4-12, >12 weeks), and outcome time period (3, 6, 12 months) on SBT prognostic ability. ⋯ These results indicate that the prognostic ability of the SBT in these non-stratified care settings was unaffected by care setting on its own. However, the prognosis of patients is affected by diverse clinical characteristics that differ between patient populations, many of which are not assessed by the SBT. When controlling for some of those factors and testing potential interactions, the results showed that only episode duration affected the SBT prognostic ability and, specifically, that the SBT was less predictive in very acute patients (<2 weeks duration).