Spine
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Cost of illness study. ⋯ The total societal costs of back pain have decreased since 1991 and also between 2002 and 2007. Although Dutch policy interventions to lower the indirect costs seem to be successful in the last decades, costs of back pain are still substantial, and indirect costs represent the majority of these costs. Policy interventions and implementation of cost-effective interventions focusing on return-to-work management for back pain in health care is important to further decrease the economic burden of back pain on society.
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Retrospective review. ⋯ The results demonstrate that RTES is a highly safe modality for monitoring spinal cord motor tract function intraoperatively.
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Sham-operation-controlled animal study to assess alterations in blood flow in the spinal cord in a chronic compression model. Laboratory investigation. ⋯ Under chronic focal spinal cord compression, there was a decrease of the blood flow in the compressed segment in comparison to the rostral segment. Our data are compatible with the hypothesis that alteration in the spinal cord blood flow contributes to pathogenesis of myelopathy.