Minimally Invasive Surgery Effective for Scoliosis

Less blood loss, good outcomes compared with open surgery

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 15 (HealthDay News) -- Minimally invasive surgery can be used to correct lumbar degenerative scoliosis with less blood loss and good outcomes compared with open surgery, according to an article in the October issue of the Journal of Spinal Disorders & Technologies.

Neel Anand, M.D., from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and colleagues examined the feasibility of minimally invasive spine surgery techniques to correct lumbar degenerative scoliosis in 12 patients (aged 50 to 85 years). Patients underwent circumferential fusion using direct lateral transpsoas approaches for discectomy and fusion on the anterior side and multilevel percutaneous screws on the posterior side.

The researchers found that surgery involved a mean of 3.64 segments. The mean blood loss for anterior procedures (transpsoas discectomy and fusion plus L5-S1 interbody fusion in some cases) was 163.89 mL, and the mean blood loss for posterior procedures (percutaneous pedicle screw fixation) was 93.33 mL. The mean surgical time was 4.01 hours and 3.99 hours for anterior and posterior procedures, respectively. The mean Cobb angle was 18.93 degrees preoperatively and 6.19 degrees postoperatively. After a mean follow-up of 75.5 days, the mean visual analog scores fell to 4.8 from 7.1, while the treatment intensity scores fell to 28.0 from 56.0, the report indicates.

"A combination of three minimally invasive spine surgery techniques allows for correction of lumbar degenerative scoliosis," Anand and colleagues conclude. "Multisegment correction can be performed with less blood loss and morbidity than for open correction."

Abstract
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