Skip anterior cervical corpectomy, fusion seen as safe for multilevel cervical pathology
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
According to published results, skip anterior cervical corpectomy and fusion is safe and effective for patients with cervical pathology who require multilevel cervical decompression and correction of cervical alignment.
Steve H. Monk, MD, and colleagues retrospectively analyzed outcomes of 45 patients (mean age of 57.5 years) who underwent skip anterior cervical corpectomy and fusion (sACCF), defined by corpectomies above and below an intervening vertebral body, from January 2010 to December 2020. According to the study, 42 patients underwent sACCF at C4-C6 and three patients underwent sACCF at C5-C7. Researchers also noted 64.4% of patients were smokers.
Outcome measures were collected at a mean follow-up of 21.1 months and included postoperative complications, instrumentation failure that required anterior revision and supplemental posterior fixation, and radiographic parameters.
Overall, 82.2% of patients were discharged within 3 days of surgery, while five patients (11.1%) developed complications, two of which were C5 palsies, and three patients (6.7%) had instrumentation failure that required reoperation at an average 2.9 months postoperatively. On postoperative radiographs, Monk and colleagues found statistically significant increases in C1-C7 lordosis (47.8 vs. 41.1, respectively) and C2-C7 lordosis (11.1 vs. 5, respectively) compared with preoperative radiographs.
“sACCF can be performed safely with complication rates similar to those reported for multilevel anterior cervical discectomy and fusion or adjacent segment ACCF,” the researchers wrote in the study. “It should be considered for patients with multilevel cervical pathology for whom an anterior approach is favored,” they concluded.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts