Muhammad Arshad.
Role of Surgery in the Management of Carrie's Spine.
Pak J Neuro Surg Jan ;16(1):36-40.

Objective: To assess the efficacy of surgical management of carrie’s spine along with anti-tuberculous medication.Material and Methods: It is a study of 15 cases of carrie’s spine which were treated surgically at the Department of Neurosurgery Quaid-e-Azam Medical College / Bahawal Victoria Hospital Bahawalpur. Study span was two years from January 2007 to December 2008. Age range was 20 to 40 years with average age of 25 years. All were young patients belonging to poor socio-economic class. It was a prospective study.Results: Fifteen patients were enrolled in this study. All were young patients belonging to poor socio-economic class. Different regions of the spine involved were; 2 cervical, 6 thoracic, 3 thoracolumbar region. Most of the patients were having history of illness at least for the last three to six months with the complaints of spinal pain, evening fever, loss of weight etc. In all the patients, some kind of surgical treatment like. Costo-transversectomy, corpectomy, removal of dead bone, pus and granulation tissues etc along with some sort of stabilization procedure was performed. Patients were able to be mobilized early after surgical procedure and ATT plus other supportive treatment was continued for one year along with regular monitoring.Outcome: The result were satisfactory as was desired because aim of surgical management was early mobilization of the patients to speed up the recovery. Almost all the patients improved to different extends regarding their neurological status.Conclusion: Surgical management along with medical treatment is indicated in carrie’s spine when the disease is not responding satisfactorily to the chemotherapy alone, when the neurological deficit is appearing or increasing. It is necessary to stabilize the spine in all these cases to halt the damage and enhance the recovery.

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