Peter Whitfield Whitfield is ACNRs Neurosurgery editor. He is a Consultant and Associate Professor in Neurosurgery at the South West Neurosurgery Centre, Plymouth. His clinical interests are wide, including neurovascular conditions, head injury, stereotactic radiosurgery, image guided tumour surgery and lumbar microdiscectomy. He is an examiner for the Royal College of Surgeons of England and t...

Great vessel injury is a rare but well-known complication of lumbar disc surgery, which may result in acute or fatal outcomes of delayed diagnosis. Thus, early detection and proper management is vital. The authors report a case of retroperitoneal hemorrhage with arteriovenous fistula and pseudoaneurysm after lumbar microdiscectomy. The patient was successfully managed by endovascular interventi...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate midazolam as an epidural analgesic in patients undergoing single-level microdiscectomy. METHODS This prospective case control study was carried out at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, from January 20 to September 20, 2007, on patients undergoing microdiscectomy. Cases (group A) received midazolam with saline, while controls (group B) received saline only, place...

recipients,24 but 46% of patients with other tumours die of their malignancy or because of organ rejection after withdrawal of immunosuppression to prevent spread of the tumour.4 Survival of transplant recipients with cancer is similar to that of those without tumours for the first eight years after transplantation but thereafter declines rapidly.'" Controlled multicentre studies (organised per...

BACKGROUND The long-term outcome after lumbar microdiscectomy (LMD) may be affected by low back pain (LBP) and segmental instability, the determinants of which remain unclear. We sought to analyze the interaction between clinical, functional, and radiological variables and their impact on patient outcome. METHODS All patients who underwent LMD in 2004-2005 were invited to participate in this ...