Journal ArticleDOI
Abnormal magnetic-resonance scans of the lumbar spine in asymptomatic subjects. A prospective investigation
TLDR
In this paper, the authors performed magnetic resonance imaging on sixty-seven individuals who had never had low-back pain, sciatica, or neurogenic claudication, and found that about one-third of the subjects were found to have a substantial abnormality.Abstract:
We performed magnetic resonance imaging on sixty-seven individuals who had never had low-back pain, sciatica, or neurogenic claudication. The scans were interpreted independently by three neuro-radiologists who had no knowledge about the presence or absence of clinical symptoms in the subjects. About one-third of the subjects were found to have a substantial abnormality. Of those who were less than sixty years old, 20 per cent had a herniated nucleus pulposus and one had spinal stenosis. In the group that was sixty years old or older, the findings were abnormal on about 57 per cent of the scans: 36 per cent of the subjects had a herniated nucleus pulposus and 21 per cent had spinal stenosis. There was degeneration or bulging of a disc at at least one lumbar level in 35 per cent of the subjects between twenty and thirty-nine years old and in all but one of the sixty to eighty-year-old subjects. In view of these findings in asymptomatic subjects, we concluded that abnormalities on magnetic resonance images must be strictly correlated with age and any clinical signs and symptoms before operative treatment is contemplated.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Diagnosis of lumbar spinal stenosis: a systematic review of the accuracy of diagnostic tests.
Irene de Graaf,Anneloes Prak,Sita M A Bierma-Zeinstra,Siep Thomas,Wilco C. Peul,Bart W. Koes +5 more
TL;DR: There is considerable variation in the clinical tests; some studies show high sensitivity, whereas others show high specificity, and no firm conclusions about the diagnostic performance of the different tests can be drawn.
Journal ArticleDOI
Lumbar Discogenic Pain: State-of-the-Art Review
TL;DR: All of the null hypotheses that have been raised against the concept of discogenic pain and its diagnosis have each been refuted by one or more studies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Clinical diagnosis for discogenic low back pain.
TL;DR: The use of serum biomarkers to diagnose DLBP is likely to increase the ease of diagnosis as well as produce more accurate and reproducible results.
Journal ArticleDOI
Prevalence of radiographic lumbar spondylosis and its association with low back pain in elderly subjects of population-based cohorts: the ROAD study.
Shigeyuki Muraki,Hiroyuki Oka,Toru Akune,Akihiko Mabuchi,Yoshio Enyo,Muneto Yoshida,Akihiko Saika,Takao Suzuki,Hideyo Yoshida,Hideaki Ishibashi,Seizo Yamamoto,Kozo Nakamura,Hiroshi Kawaguchi,Noriko Yoshimura +13 more
TL;DR: Gender seems to be distinctly associated with KL ⩾2 and KL⩾3 lumbar spondylosis, and disc space narrowing with or without osteophytosis in women may be a risk factor for low back pain.
Journal ArticleDOI
Innervation of pathologies in the lumbar vertebral end plate and intervertebral disc
TL;DR: Findings indicate that vertebral end-plate pathologies are more innervated than intervertebral disc pathologies and that many innervations are not detectable on MRI, and suggest that improved visualization of end- plate pathologies could enhance the diagnostic value of MRI for chronic low back pain.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Back pain and sciatica.
TL;DR: Low back pain is usually a self-limiting symptom, but it costs at least $16 billion each year and disables 5.4 million Americans, and the fact that a benign physical condition has such an importa...
Journal ArticleDOI
A study of computer-assisted tomography. I. The incidence of positive CAT scans in an asymptomatic group of patients.
TL;DR: To study the type and number of CAT scan abnormalities of the lumbar spine that occur in asymptomatic people, 52 studies from a control population with no history of back trouble were mixed randomly with six scans from patients with surgically proven spinal disease, and all were interpreted by three neuroradiologists in a blinded fashion.
Journal ArticleDOI
Abnormal myelograms in asymptomatic patients.
TL;DR: The incidence of myelographic abnormalities in 300 patients who were studied by posterior fossa myelography to establish a diagnosis of acoustic tumor is reported, even though patients had no symptoms of cervical or lumbar nerve root compression at the time of the examination.
Journal ArticleDOI
The question of lumbar discography.
TL;DR: It has not been established whether internal derangement of the lumbar disc is sufficiently symptom-producing to be a therapeutic objective, especially a surgical one, or whether it represetits anything more than an aging process, and the patterns of degeneration seen in 628 of 2,187 discs injected by the Cleveland group and 773 of 6,784 discs injections by Feinberg or 322 of 870 disc injected by Massie and Stevens may represent nothing more than normal patterns for the age
Journal ArticleDOI
Lumbar herniated disk disease and canal stenosis: prospective evaluation by surface coil MR, CT, and myelography
TL;DR: The results of this study indicate that a technically adequate MR examination was equivalent to CT and myelography in the diagnosis of lumbar canal stenosis and herniated disk disease.