Pregnancy in Patients with Low Back Pain

Pregnancy-related lumbopelvic pain has been a serious and common problem since ancient time. The present review article focuses on terminology, types, clinical presentation, and management of these problems.There are two entities regarding pregnancy-related lumbopelvic pain: pelvic girdle pain (PGP)’’, and pregnancy-related low back pain (PLBP). There are multiple mechanisms behind these disabilities.Age, multiparty, heavy weight lifting, hard physical activity, previous low back pain, and low education increase the prevalence. About one-half of women with pregnancy-related lumbopelvic pain have PGP, one-third LBP, and one-sixth have both conditions. Overall, the literature reveals that PPP deserves serious attention from the clinical and economic standpoint

A Survey on Cortical Bone Trajectory for Spinal Fusions

There have been a number of developments in screw design and implantation techniques over recent years, including proposal of an alternative trajectory entitled as cortical bone trajectory (CBT). Cortical bone trajectory has been investigated in recent medical treatments as an alternative for screw fixation aimed at increasing purchase of pedicle screws in higher density bone. CBT screw insertion follows a lateral path in the transverse plane and caudocephalad path in the sagittal plane. This technique has been advocated because it is reportedly less invasive, improves screw−bone purchase and reduces neurovascular injury. Furthermore CBT pedicle screw fixation provides stabilization to multilevel lumbar segment with low-grade spondylolisthesis comparable to the standard trajectory pedicle screw construct. However, these claims have not been supported by robust clinical evidence. Recent investigations focus on evaluations of CBT as a pioneer method.

Air in Straight Sinus after Closed Head Injury Surgery

Air in the intracranial vascular compartment is rare and only few case reports are published in the literature. Without surgery or open head trauma, the origin of air bubbles in the venous sinus is still debated. We report an admitted patient in the emergency room one hour after a severe closed head injury, and in whom, the post-surgical cranial CT scan demonstrated feature of air embolism along the straight sinus. Mechanisms explaining how air reaches the venous compartment is discussed

Non-invasive intracranial pressure measurement using transcranial doppler sonography and support vector machines

Current techniques used for intracranial pressure (ICP) measurement are invasive. All require a surgical procedure for placement of a pressure catheter in the central nervous system (CNS) and therefore are associated with risk and morbidity. In this study we propose a noninvasive method for ICP measurement based on signal processing techniques.. In this method a non-linear relationship is used to determine ICP based on two more accessible parameters, namely arterial blood pressure (ABP) and the blood velocity of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) measured using the transcranial doppler (TCD) device. The clinical investigation of the proposed method shows high similarity between the invasively recorded intracranial pressure (ICP) and the predicted ICP using our proposed method under intensive care unit (ICU) conditions. A correlation of r=0.976 was achieved between the predicted ICP and the invasively ICP measurements, which shows a highly sensitive procedure in noninvasive ICP measurement.4 page(s

Extradural Thoracic Arachnoid Cyst En-Bloc Resection and Follow-Up: A Case Report

Background: Arachnoid cysts are cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) fluid-filled sacs that are located between the brain and spinal cord. Spinal column arachnoid cysts are rare and mostly asymptomatic, being mostly located in intradural regions. We reported a patient who presented with neurological deficits and mid-thoracic extradural arachnoid cyst treated with en-bloc resection.Case Presentation: Patient was a 34-year-old female who presented with progressive back pain, lower extremity weakness and paresthesia in her lower limbs. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study revealed an extradural hyperintense signal lesion in T2-weighted, extending from T7 to T9, which did not enhance on T1-weighted post-contrast MRI. Patient underwent T6-T10 laminectomy and en-bloc resection of the lesion which was compatible with arachnoid cyst after histopathological examination. Patient did not experience worsening of neurological symptoms and lesion recurrence in clinical and imaging evaluation during 2-year follow-up.Conclusion: Clinical and neuroimaging evaluation of every patient with progressive neurological deficits should be carried out in detail. This report suggests that rare spinal lesion, as extradural spinal arachnoid cyst in this case, may cause neurologic deficits and en-bloc resection of the lesion is feasible and may prevent local recurrence