Back Problems after surgery: How likely is it?
Hello!
It is shockingly common how many people come to see us after their back operation complaining of more pain and problems in their back. Some even have their pinched nerves come back.
As we helped so many of these kinds of people that they believe we are the only place to go, we wanted to see how likely it was that problems develop after back surgery.
Here is what we found.
One study done in the early nineties looked at 100 people who had decompressive surgery for lumbar stenosis were followed up 5 years afterwards.
They found that “Initially there was a high incidence of success, but recurrence of neurological involvement and persistence of low-back pain led to an increasing number of failures. By 5 years this number had reached 27% of the available population pool, suggesting that the failure rate could reach 50% within the projected life expectancies of most patients.”
“Of the 26 failures, 16 were secondary to renewed neurological involvement, which occurred at new levels of stenosis in eight and recurrence of stenosis at operative levels in eight. Reoperation was successful in 12 of these 16 patients, but two required a third operation.”
Half of all operations failed over time and most required another operation. I find this a terrifying outcome.
In a different study done by Neurosurgeons, looking at how many cases after fusion deteriorated found that “Among them, the cases which had progressed more than 2 levels of degenerative grade were 0 in group A, 7 cases (77.8%) in group B, and 6 cases (85.7%) in group C”.
Another study done by spinal surgeons found “Fifty-nine (27.4%) of the 215 patients had evidence of degeneration at the adjacent levels and elected to have an additional decompression (fifteen patients) or arthrodesis (forty-four patients). Kaplan-Meier analysis predicted a disease-free survival rate of 83.5% (95% confidence interval, 77.5% to 89.5%) at five years and of 63.9% (95% confidence interval, 54.0% to 73.8%) at ten years after the index operation.”
“There was a trend toward the progression of the arthritic grade at the adjacent disc levels.”
“The rate of symptomatic degeneration at an adjacent segment warranting either decompression or arthrodesis was predicted to be 16.5% at five years and 36.1% at ten years.”
As you can see the chances to have another surgery doubled every 5 years.
Do you want to take the risk of surgery or try something different?
Jason
