PURPOSE OF REVIEW To highlight the relevance of preoperative differentiation of degenerative mitral valve disease based on etiology (predominantly Barlow's Disease or fibroelastic deficiency) and severity of lesions with an emphasis on how such differentiation by the cardiologist can result in increased rate of mitral valve repair. RECENT FINDINGS In the hands of reference mitral valve-repair...

Spinal stenosis and degenerative spondylolisthesis share many symptoms and the same treatment, but their causes remain unclear. Bone mineral density has been suggested to play a role. The aim of this study was to investigate differences in spinal bone density between spinal stenosis and degenerative spondylolisthesis patients. 81 patients older than 60 years, who underwent DXA-scanning of their...

There is great uncertainty regarding the relation between degenerative changes and age. This article aimed to summarize and quantify association between age and degenerative changes in the cervical spine by using the common imaging techniques. A structured literature search was conducted on medline (PubMed), Google Scholar and other databases. The search had no period or language restrictions. ...

AIMS This study is to determine if expression level of microRNA-143 (miR-143) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) are related to the occurrence and development of degenerative scoliosis. METHODS A total of 30 patients with degenerative scoliosis, 30 patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis were enrolled in this study. For control, 30 patients with spinal burst fractures were also enrolled in th...

The aim of the present study was to screen differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in human degenerative intervertebral discs (IVDs), and to perform functional analysis on these DEGs. The gene expression profile was downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus database (GSE34095)and included six human IVD samples: three degenerative and three non-degenerative. The DEGs between the normal and disea...

PURPOSE We investigated types and prevalence of coexisting lesions found on whole spine sagittal T2-weighted images (WSST2I) acquired from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and evaluated their clinical significance in surgical degenerative spinal diseases. MATERIALS AND METHODS Coexisting spinal lesions were investigated using WSST2I from 306 consecutive patients with surgical degenerative spi...

Objective. To date, there is still no consensus on the treatment of spinal degenerative disease. Current surgical techniques to manage painful spinal disorders are imperfect. In this paper, we aimed to evaluate the prospective results of posterior transpedicular dynamic stabilization, a novel surgical approach that skips the segments that do not produce pain. This technique has been proven biom...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Knee arthroscopy is commonly performed to treat degenerative knee disease symptoms and traumatic meniscal tears. We evaluated whether the recent high-quality randomized control trials not favoring arthroscopic surgery for degenerative knee disease affected the procedure incidence and trends in Finland and Sweden. PATIENTS AND METHODS We conducted a bi-national registry-...

OBJECTIVE To comparatively investigate the expression of several integrins in specimens of human bone metastases and degenerative bone tissue. METHODS Degenerative cancellous tissue was obtained from a sample of human degenerative spine. Thirteen human specimens were obtained from metastatic spine tumors, whose primary cancer was colon cancer (n=3), hepatocellular cancer (n=3), lung cancer (n...

OBJECTIVE Degenerative aortic stenosis shows similarities with atherosclerosis. To confirm the hypothesis that aortic stenosis is an "atherosclerosis-like" disease, we investigated the association between degenerative aortic stenosis and atherosclerosis of carotid arteries. METHODS We studied 270 consecutive patients, 135 with degenerative aortic stenosis (trans-aortic peak velocity ≥ 2 m/sec...