Paraspinal muscles are commonly affected during spine surgery. The purpose of this study was to assess the potential factors that contribute to paraspinal muscle atrophy (PMA) after lumbar spine surgery. A comprehensive review of the available English literature, including relevant abstracts and references of articles selected for review, was conducted to identify studies that reported PMA afte...

Spine surgery is a continuously evolving field. Traditional posterior midline approaches to the lumbar spine are associated with muscle injury. Common mechanisms of injury include ischemia, denervation, and mechanical disruption of tendinous attachments of lumbar muscles. Muscle injury may be documented with chemical markers (creatinine kinase, aldolase, proinflammatory cytokines), by imaging s...

BACKGROUND Current research has shown that exercise induces an increase in spinal range of motion (ROM) which is primarily due to spinal creep. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding the cause of spinal creep; some believe it is due to the warm up effect of exercise while others believe it is the result of the position of the lumbar spine during the exercise. AIM The aim of this pros...

Deer and sheep spines are often used as models of the human spine. A prerequisite for the use of animal models is information regarding the interspecies differences in the parameters of general interest. This would clarify the limitations of each animal model and substantiate the applicability of the obtained results to humans. Since sufficient data appear to be currently unavailable, we sought...

We present a new MRI finding within the lumbar spine in a series of six patients admitted with CT proven subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) where cerebral angiography demonstrated no aneurysm and who had not had a lumbar puncture. A retrospective audit of 130 patients presenting to a regional neurosciences centre over a 13 month period with a suspected diagnosis of SAH was performed. Seven patients...

Despite the good general patient acceptance, high patient comfort, safety and precision in the needle placement, exposure to radiation in computed tomography (CT)-guided spinal interventions remains a serious concern, and is often used to argue against its use. The aim of this study was to determine the technical possibilities of reducing the radiation dose in CT-guided epidural and periradicul...

Introduction Spinal muscles transmit most of the kinematical forces to the spine tissues and therefore, careful modelling of muscle activity is critical for an adequate estimation of spinal loads. However, current lumbar spine numerical models overlook such muscle contribution or suggest simplifications that do not allow thorough studies of load transfers within the deforming spine. As such, th...

To understand the dynamic characteristics of the human spine, a detailed three-dimensional finite element model of the lower thorax to pelvis segment, T12-pelvis, was developed based on actual vertebral geometry. After modal analysis, the resonant frequencies of different spinal segments were obtained. The vibration mode of T12-pelvis shows that the human upper body mainly performs the vertical...

BACKGROUND Hemodynamic perturbations in spine surgeries are predominantly reported in cervical and thoracic level procedures. The literature related to negative cardiovascular changes (decrease of heart rate and blood pressure) in lumbar spine procedures is still scarce and only highlighted in few case reports/letters until now. METHODS With the help of a systematic literature review with pre...