Treatment of spinal-cord injury.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to T B Ducker.
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Because of the variation in the natural history, anatomy, surgical treatment, and follow-up periods reported to date, very few firm conclusions can be drawn regarding syringomyelia. With the advent of magnetic resonance scanning, cases of syringomyelia are being detected earlier and a better understanding of the disease has been facilitated. The authors report their personal experiences with 21 patients followed for 5-20 years. No single surgical procedure appears to predictably remedy any syrinx for more than a brief period of several years. Complete collapse of the syrinx does not eradicate all symptoms. Direct treatment of the syrinx makes intuitive sense for those syrinxes that do not communicate with the fourth ventricle. On the other hand, for syrinxes that are likely to communicate with the fourth ventricle, shunting of the ventricular system, particularly where ventriculomegaly exists (i.e., any degree of radiographic evidence of ventricular enlargement), should be considered initially. Procedures such as posterior fossa decompression may be necessary as dictated by the neurological condition of the patient. In the authors' experience, shunting procedures provided better improvement, with longer duration of improvement than with posterior fossa decompression. The timing and surgical details of posterior fossa decompression remain to be elucidated.
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The lumbar spine magnetic resonance (MR) studies in 246 consecutive patients who suffered from persistent back and leg pain were evaluated for the degree of degenerative disc disease and the presence of disc bulging, prolapse, or herniation. No patient had a history of previous back surgery. In those patients, degenerative disc changes increased with age until the fifth decade of life, after which a relatively similar proportion of patients had degenerative disc disease. Significant dehydration and degeneration occurred in less than 5% of the upper two disc spaces while L4/5 and L5/S1 had marked changes in greater than 20%. Prolapse and herniation progressively increased with each lower interspace, where at L5/S1 it was present in nearly one-third of the patients. Although a few patients had disc prolapse or herniation with a nondegenerated disc, there was a relationship between the presence of disc degeneration and prolapse or herniation.
The surgical approach to the treatment of cervical spondylitic myelopathy has been one of major controversy, both clinically and in the literature. We present here the results of a retrospective analysis of 206 patients treated by the authors over a 7-year period by either a posterior or anterior approach. Our results suggest that if the procedure is tailored to the cause as well as extent of the problem, similarly good results can be obtained by either surgical approach.
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The authors have prospectively examined the occurrence of postoperative wound infection following clean neurosurgery in 936 patients. Fewer than 1% received perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis. The overall rate of deep wound infection was 2.6%; no deaths were directly attributable to these infections. Deep wound infections occurred significantly more frequently following craniotomy (4.3%) than following spinal (0.9%) or other clean neurosurgery. Among craniotomies, the deep wound infection rate varied significantly from 11% following repeat operations for recurrent gliomas to 2.5% following non-tumor surgery. Risk of deep wound infection varied more than 11-fold depending on the type of clean neurosurgical operation. It is most feasible to demonstrate the potential efficacy of perioperative antibiotics in clean neurosurgical procedures with the greatest risk of postoperative wound infection. The potential benefit from such prophylaxis would be greatest for patients undergoing these high-risk operations.