2012 Resident Writer's Award: 3rd Place Winner

My name is Jeffrey Gum and I'm a 5th year resident at University of Louisville, Department of Orthopedics. I'm doing a Spine fellowship next year at Washington University in St. Louis. I will be talking about the paper Correlation Between Cervical Spine Sagittal Alignment and Clinical Outcome After Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion.

A paper that Dr. Glassman and Dr. Carreon were co-authors on and my mentors. They're the ones who helped develop the idea. We started the project about 4 years ago. At that time there was a lot of press and literature coming out about how sagittal alignment is driving outcomes in spine surgery

We wanted to look at this from the cervical spine perspective. Our cohort was 101 patients. We looked at pre-op and two-year post-op outcome meausures which included NDI, Neck Disability Index, Short-Form 36 Physical Composite Summary and we compared these with cervical lordosis and sagittal alignment.

We looked at overall alignment and segmental lordosis and we found that although it wasn't the primary driver of outcomes it was important to maintain at least 6° of lordosis in the postoperative period to help reach MCID which is Minimum Clinically Important Difference at least for NDI (Neck Disability Index) which was our primary outcome measure

Clinically, this is critical because as mentioned in several other studies sagittal alignment is very important as far as outcome. In the cervical spine it is important but it is not necessarily the primary driver as far as outcomes go.

So, I'm glad this paper has had some interest. I believe it was selected as 3rd for the Resident Writer's Award. From my perspective I would like to thank Dr. Glassman and Dr. Carreon for their guidance and help with this project, and the American Journal of Orthopedics for the award and opportunity.

To read the full study, click here.