Disability after Anterior Decompression and Fusion for Cervical Disc Disease

Long-term randomised comparison between a carbon fibre cage and the Cloward procedure in the cervical spine

“…In the present study 36% of patients returned to fulltime work, which is similar to the rates reported by several previous Scandinavian authors [7,11,19]. However, compared to Goldberg et al [8] and Mayer et al [16], who reported 97 and 81% rates of return to work, our rate was low.…”

“…There are many retrospective reports on positive long-term effects of ACDF such as decreased pain, regression of neurological symptoms, and high rates of a satisfactory global outcome [2,7,9,10,14]. The present results are more modest and more in line with earlier prospective reports, confirming that retrospective studies have a tendency to overestimates outcomes [11,17,19,21,22,30].…”

“…In the present study, distress was not quantified preoperatively. At long-term, however, 66% of the patients were classified as distressed or at risk of distress, verifying the short-term results in another study [19]. Similarly, Mayer et al [16] reported 47% of patients having abnormalities on Beck Depression Inventory one year after ACDF.…”

Using the cervical range of motion (CROM) device to assess head repositioning accuracy in individuals with cervical radiculopathy in comparison to neck- healthy individuals

“…As an alternative method for assessment of HRA, the Cervical Range of Motion (CROM) device has been used in several studies with reported good reliability (Loudon et al, 1997;Dumas et al, 2001;Uremovic et al, 2007). Individuals with cervical radiculopathy caused by disc disease (CDD) display reduced physical functioning and overall health (Peolsson et al, 2002;Daffner et al, 2003;Ylinen et al, 2003;Peolsson and Kjellman, 2007). Assessment of HRA is recommended in individuals with neck pain (Humphreys, 2008;Treleaven, 2008;Kristjansson and Treleaven, 2009), but to our knowledge, studies reporting this assessment have not previously been carried out in individuals with CDD.…”

A tissue velocity ultrasound imaging investigation of the dorsal neck muscles during resisted isometric extension

“…Individuals with neck pain demonstrate less neck muscle strength (Jordan et al, 1997;Peolsson et al, 2002) and endurance (Lee et al, 2003;Peolsson & Kjellman, 2007), greater neck muscle fatigability (Gogia et al, 1994), and altered activation patterns (Falla et al, 2004;Jull et al, 2004) than persons without neck complaints. Strong evidence exists that physical exercise is effective in the rehabilitation of patients with neck disorders (Kay et al, 2005), but a consensus has not been reached regarding the key components of such an intervention.…”