ACDF – one of the most common cervical spine surgery. It’s done from the front, very safe surgery, minimal blood loss, patients usually can be sent the same day or the next day out of the hospital. In which we clean the disc, put a bone graft or an implant or a cage filled with bone graft, put a small plate and fuse them.
This can be done at multiple levels. This can be done right from almost from C3-C7, also if needed. When it is done on multiple levels, sometimes they will need to be backed up by a posterior surgery also.
This is another variation of an ACDF, the standalone implants, no plates are needed. We put the screws through the graft itself. This is a corpectomy like the case I showed you. If the disc variation is behind the body, then we may have to remove the body itself to remove the compression, and then in that case, we put a cage and back it up with a plate on the top.
This is a surgery in which patients with congenital stenosis, multi-level stenosis, who have lordotic spine in which case, an anterior surgery, maybe too long surgery, than we do, and more of the compression is from the back, then we do a laminectomy from the back.
Laminectomy has always to be backed up by instrumentation in the cervical spine. It’s not like a lumbar spine where we can leave it. In like 30 years back, we used to leave them, but then there were a lot of failures that patients go into kyphosis. So always we have to back them up with instrumentation.
Read more about Cervical Spine Surgery here
I am Vedant Vaksha, Fellowship trained Spine, Sports and Arthroscopic Surgeon at Complete Orthopedics. I take care of patients with ailments of the neck, back, shoulder, knee, elbow and ankle. I personally approve this content and have written most of it myself.
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