The factors that are considered to be associated with successful clinical outcome fallowing cervical arthroplasty surgery are patient selection, absence of facet joint changes and lack of pre-operative kyphosis. Even though many studies have cited the pre-operative demographic details of their patient groups, the effect of associated psychological co-morbidities (Depression/Anxiety), smoking history, gender, social benefits and employment status on the clinical outcome measures have not been reported. The aim of the study was to assess the influence of pre-operative patient characteristics on the clinical outcomes following cervical disc replacement. We included 126 patients who underwent single or multiple level cervical arthroplasty in our unit were included in the study. The clinical outcome measures such as Visual Analogue Score for neck pain (VAS-NP) and arm pain (VAS-AP); Neck disability Index (NDI), Hospital depression and anxiety scale and Bodily pain component of Short Form 36 questionnaires (SF-36 P) were recorded pre and post operatively. Statistical analysis was completed using SPSS 16.0 statistical package (SPSS Inc, Chicago, IL).Background
Methods
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. 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.Introduction
Methods