The Cross-sectional Area of the Cervical Spinal Canal in Patients With Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy

Abstract

The preoperative clinical presentation of the patient was found to be the only prognostic hint for improvement after surgery. Preoperative area measurements of the spinal canal cannot be used as a prognostic tool for surgical outcome. Further, the postoperative measurements do not correlate with the clinical outcome. These data, however, which refer to C4 to C6, provide evidence that every surgical procedure to enlarge the cervical spinal canal should result in an area of 1.6 cm or more.

Diffusion tensor imaging and fibre tracking in cervical spondylotic myelopathy

“…However, discrepancies between clinical features and signal intensity of the spinal cord on both T1-and T2-weighted sequences have been reported [1][2][3]. The transverse area measurement of the cervical canal has been found useful [4], but the measurement method has some influence on the clinical correlation [5] and this technique does not assess the functional reduction of the canal during the cervical spinal motion, which has a predominant role in the natural course of myelopathy [6,7].…”

Factors affecting the surgical results of expansive laminoplasty for cervical spondylotic myelopathy

“…There are many reports on the factors affecting the prognosis of surgery for patients with cervical myelopathy [1,2,4,3,5,6,7,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,19,21,22]. Some factors have been said to influence the results, but not all have been proved to be of prognostic value.…”

The value of a new method for assessing the separate functions of the long tracts and involved segments in patients with cervical myelopathy

“…Their main purpose is to determine the degree to which the symptoms and signs improve after treatment. However, these previous methods of assessment [2,3,5] do not include the duration of any recovery after treatment. In assessing recovery of spinal cord activity, information about the time period involved is important because it is natural to assume that a patient whose symptoms and signs improve rapidly has a more viable spinal cord than a patient with slow recovery.…”

“…However, there are currently no methods available to do this [2,3,5]. When considering any recovery of spinal cord function, improvement of the neurological condition must be recorded in relation to the speed of improvement.…”