Abstract： Objective To employ intraoperative discography to determine the injured intervertebral disc segments that can not be identified on the preoperative MRI in patients with cervical spinal cord injury without fracture and dislocation for confirming the responsible segments needing surgical decompression and fusion. Methods The study involved 85 patients with cervical spinal cord injury without fracture and dislocation treated from January 2007 to December 2011, among which sixteen patients had not been identified with the responsible segments by preoperative MRI. The average preoperative Japanese Orthopedic Association (JOA) score was (9.1±1.8) points. There was no obvious fracture or dislocation of the cervical spine on preoperative X-ray film, CT and MRI, but all patients displayed high intense signal in cervical spinal cord on MRI T2 weighted imaging. Besides, MRI revealed hemorrhagic swelling of anterior cervical soft tissue in nine patients and cervical intervertebral disk hernia in all patients. Annulus fibrosus rupture of cervical intervertebral disc with contrast leakage in intraoperative discography of suspected injury segments in all patients under direction of C-arm X-ray machine was set as the injury criterion. The patients with pure ruptured discs received cervical discectomy, interbody fusion and titanium plate fixation. The patients associated with multilevel cervical intervertebral disc hernia or ossification of posterior longitudinal ligament underwent anterior cervical corpectomy, bone graft with titanium cageand titanium plate fixation of ruptured discs. Results Nineteen injured discs were identified eventually by discography, including 2 discs at C 3/4, 4 at C 4/5, 8 at C 5/6 and 5 at C 6/7. Moreover, anterior annulus fibrosus rupture with intact anterior longitudinal ligament was found in 11 patients. The follow-up lasted for (24.4±10.0) months. JOA scores were (13.3±1.5) points and (14.5±1.6) points at two weeks and three months after operation, and (15.1±1.5) points at the last follow-up, indicating a relevant improvement rate of 53%, 68% and 76% respectively. Mean operation time was 110 minutes and blood loss was 120 ml. Three patients had pain on shoulder and back and one patient had hoarse voice, but all the patients were relieved in two weeks after conservative treatments. No serious complications, such as deep infection, deterioration of neurological dysfunction, vertebral artery injury or internal fixation failure were noticed intra-or post-operatively. Conclusion For the intradiscal rupture that is hard to be determined by the conventional imaging methods, intraoperative discography can be used as an auxiliary method of imaging diagnosis in early surgical determination of responsible segments for cervical spinal cord injury without fracture and dislocation.
. Intraoperative discography for determining responsible segments in cervical spinal cord injury without fracture and dislocation[J]. CHINESE JOURNAL OF TRAUMA, 2013, 29(1): 25-29.
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