Towards a timely diagnosis of spinal tuberculosis

Spinal tuberculosis: diagnosis and management

The spinal column is involved in less than 1% of all cases of tuberculosis (TB). Spinal TB is a very dangerous type of skeletal TB as it can be associated with neurologic deficit due to compression of adjacent neural structures and significant spinal deformity. Therefore, early diagnosis and management of spinal TB has special importance in preventing these serious complications. In order to ex...

Early diagnosis of spinal tuberculosis by MRI.

MRI was performed at three centres in Bombay on 24 patients clinically suspected of tuberculosis of the spine but with normal radiographs. There were 11 males and 13 females and their average age was 24 years (11 to 60). 99mTc bone scans were done in 16 patients before MRI. Eleven patients had the diagnosis confirmed by biopsy and the remainder all responded rapidly to specific antituberculous ...

Towards Lab-free Tuberculosis Diagnosis

Spinal muscular atrophy: a timely review.

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by loss of motor neurons in the anterior horn of the spinal cord and resultant weakness. The most common form of SMA, accounting for 95% of cases, is autosomal recessive proximal SMA associated with mutations in the survival of motor neurons (SMN1) gene. Relentless progress during the past 15 years in the understanding o...

Anterior spinal surgery alone in the surgical treatment of thoracolumbar spinal tuberculosis: a prospective study

 Background: One of the important sites for extrapulmonary TB involvement is the skeleton. Tuberculous spondylitis (Pott’s disease) comprises 50-70% of the skeletal tuberculosis. Methods: In this case series study, we prospectively investigated the result of anterior surgery alone (anterior debridement, fusion and instrumentation) in the patients with spinal tuberculosis. The patients with imma...