Vertebroplasty – the treatment of osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures with immediate effect! In modern society, with an increasingly aging population, senile osteoporosis is very common, and the occurrence of osteoporotic fractures in various parts of the body is becoming more and more frequent, with thoracolumbar compression fractures being one of the more common ones, seriously threatening the health of the middle-aged and elderly. After the fracture occurs, the problem in front of patients and their families is how to treat it, should they choose conservative treatment? Or is surgery better? There are many patients with osteoporotic thoracolumbar compression fractures who have been cured by vertebroplasty, and the above are two of the most common cases, but they are more representative and indicative of the problem because of the trouble they went through in seeking medical treatment. In the case of elderly people with reduced bone quality, compression fractures of the thoracolumbar spine can be caused by minor trauma, which is becoming more and more common in orthopedic clinics and very difficult to treat. The traditional treatment methods are long-term bed rest, medication and brace, but these methods cannot effectively relieve the pain symptoms, and long-term bed rest further aggravates the osteoporosis, which is more prone to secondary complications such as infection, thrombosis and reduced cardiopulmonary function, and brings a heavy burden of care to the family; while the surgical internal fixation treatment is prone to failure due to the poor screw holding power of the patient’s osteoporosis, coupled with the physical condition of most patients. Even with surgical internal fixation, it is not superior to non-surgical treatment because of the long waiting time for fracture healing, pain and other factors, and the inability to move around early. Vertebroplasty was first proposed by a French scholar named Calibert in 1987 and has been rapidly developed and applied in orthopedics in the last decade, and is now gradually regarded as the treatment of choice for vertebral compression fractures caused by osteoporosis. It is a truly minimally invasive technique for the spine, using percutaneous puncture to inject bone cement into the compressed vertebral body through the pedicle to stabilize and strengthen the vertebral body, while restoring the height of the vertebral body, relieving or eliminating vertebral pain, and enabling the patient to regain health and get out of bed as soon as possible. After vertebroplasty, the patient’s pain can be significantly reduced or disappeared immediately, which has an immediate effect and significantly improves the patient’s quality of life, and has the advantages of easy operation, less trauma, less pain, and early movement of the patient to the ground. In addition to osteoporotic vertebral compression fractures, vertebroplasty can also be applied to vertebral hemangiomas, myeloma, osteolytic metastases, primary malignant tumors of the vertebral body, etc. In the treatment of osteoporotic vertebral fractures in the elderly, the surgical experience is as follows: preoperative CT scan is used to determine whether the posterior wall of the affected vertebra is intact, and if there is a fracture in the posterior wall, vertebroplasty is not considered in order to avoid nerve damage caused by cement infiltration into the spinal canal and to ensure the safety of the operation; in the elderly, there are often more than two vertebral fractures at the same time, and the vertebra with obvious compression on the X-ray is not necessarily the one causing the pain. In addition, since some patients do not have obvious percussion pain and the pain site is different, it is crucial to determine the “responsible vertebra” to ensure the efficacy of surgery. If a high signal of edema is found in a vertebral body, it can be determined that this vertebral body is the “responsible vertebra” for the pain.