Abstract
Introduction
In the last decade, single level cervical arthroplasty has proven its efficacy as one of the surgical treatment option for for patients suffering from cervical degenerative disc disease. Recent published reports on multilevel cervical arthroplasty using single implants have shown statistically significant results when compared to single level surgery. The aim of this study is to compare the clinical outcomes of multilevel cervical arthroplasty to single level cervical arthroplasty, when more than one type of implants were used.
Methods
This is a prospective study of consecutive patients who presented to our unit in between June 2006 and November 2009. The maximum follow-up period was 51 months (mean=18 months). Several types of cervical arthroplasty devices have been used in this study. The clinical outcome measures such as Visual Analogue Score for neck pain (VAS-NP) and arm pain (VAS-AP); Neck disability Index (NDI) and the Bodily pain component of Short Form 36 questionnaires were recorded pre and post operatively. After confirming the normality of the data appropriate parametric (paired t-test) were used to assess the statistical significance (p< 0.05) between pre and post-operative values. Two sample T-test was used to assess the significance between the differences in mean scores between each group.
Results
A total of 105 patients (37 single level, 68 multi-level) were included in the study. Mean age of patients was 51 years (Range 32–80) with Male: Female ratio of 9:10. All clinical outcome measures showed statistically significant improvement in the post-operative period in single as well as multilevel group. However, there was no statistically significant difference in the improvement in between single and multilevel surgeries.
Conclusions
Our study results clearly demonstrate that multilevel cervical arthroplasty offers the similar clinical outcome when compared to single level surgery, despite using different type of implant in multilevel surgeries.
