Minimally invasive treatment of lumbar compression fractures

     A 55-year-old woman who fell on her hip and injured her lower back was seen in a primary care hospital, where an X-ray revealed a mild compression fracture of the lumbar 1 vertebra. After lying in bed for a few days, the patient felt that the symptoms were not serious and started to get up for daily chores. Later, the low back pain worsened progressively, and three months later, he came to our clinic and had his X-rays reviewed. The compression was significantly aggravated with retroconvexity, and minimally invasive percutaneous lumbar lordosis surgery was recommended. However, the patient still hesitated. Later, the patient came back to our clinic 6 months after the injury because of further aggravation of low back pain, lumbar lordosis, and neurological symptoms of sometimes uncontrolled urination, and finally underwent a very traumatic and risky lumbar osteotomy due to severe old lordosis.  In fact, within three months after the injury, this patient underwent a minimally invasive procedure called “percutaneous lumbar kyphoplasty” through a small incision of 0.5 cm under local anesthesia, which took more than half an hour and allowed him to go to the ground within a few days after the operation, with completely different consequences.  The so-called “percutaneous lumbar kyphoplasty (PKP)” is a percutaneous puncture of the vertebral body under the supervision of imaging equipment, using a balloon to expand the collapsed vertebral body, push out the adjacent bone, restore the height of the vertebral body, and create a space within the vertebral body, then injecting bone cement to fill the space and penetrate into the loose bone of the vertebral body, in order to Increase the strength of the vertebral body, stabilize the diseased vertebral body, and prevent the collapse of the vertebral body, thus providing immediate relief or reduction of pain and preventing the aggravation of the disease.  PKP is a minimally invasive procedure that has emerged abroad in recent years, has not been introduced into China for a long time, requires certain surgical skills, and is mainly used to treat vertebral compression fractures caused by various reasons. The best indications are osteoporotic compression fractures as well as traumatic simple compression fractures. Selective application to metastatic tumors, vertebral myeloma, and invasive hemangioma has also yielded good results. In the past five years, we have relieved the pain of hundreds of patients with very few complications.