Interspinous stabilization device for the treatment of lumbar spine disorders

Lumbar disc herniation is the most common affliction of the spine, causing a great deal of pain and distress. Although the majority of patients do not require surgical treatment, about 10% of patients still have to undergo surgery. The traditional surgical procedure is nerve release and herniated disc nucleus pulposus removal, which has been performed for more than 100 years. Many improvements have been made to minimize the trauma of surgery, such as the use of microscopic techniques or the use of televisions, which have improved the efficacy of the procedure to some extent. In recent years, techniques such as lateral approach microscopy and neurogenic foramenoscopy have also been introduced to further minimize the trauma of the surgery. However, the basic principle of all these techniques is to remove a portion of the herniated disc that is compressing the nerve root, thereby achieving symptomatic relief. Due to the removal of the disc, the structure of the functional units of the lumbar spine actually becomes worse. As a result, some patients can experience worsening of low back pain after surgery or recurrence of the herniation. Recognizing this problem, some surgeons have turned to total discectomy with pedicle fusion, which has been called the “gold standard” because it provides early lumbar stabilization, allows for early exercise, and provides reliable results, but the fusion comes at the cost of loss of the lumbar motion segments. Some researchers have found that the adjacent segments of the fused vertebrae may degenerate at an accelerated rate, even leading to “adjacent segment disc disease”. At the same time, fusion fixation is destructive and essentially “end-of-life”, making it difficult to deal with any complications that may arise from the procedure. It is intuitively conceivable that the best solution is to repair the diseased intervertebral disc as if it were new, which we call “bioprosthetic disc repair”, but this technology is still in the research stage and is difficult to be applied in the clinic in the short term. The second better option is to use artificial discs for replacement. This technique has been developed for decades and has made promising progress, with many patients receiving treatment with this technique and achieving surprising clinical results. However, due to the complexity of the surgical technique and the reliability of the artificial discs, further development is still needed, and the surgical application is currently limited to highly trained and experienced physicians. In recent years, another technique that has achieved excellent clinical results is the application of the “interspinous stabilization device”, which is a very clever design. Biomechanical studies have confirmed that this device can reduce the undesirable stresses in the intervertebral discs and improve the motion of the lumbar spinal segments, and even experiments have confirmed that this technique can help to restore the degenerated discs to normal. It has even been experimentally demonstrated that this technique can help restore the normal structure of degenerated intervertebral discs, making it an excellent choice for the treatment of lumbar spine disorders today. Another advantage of this procedure over fusion fixation is that it is basically a minimally invasive procedure that causes little damage to the structure of the lumbar spine, and even if the patient’s condition changes over a period of time, fusion fixation can still be performed.