Impact of tramadol abuse on clinical outcome of lumbar discectomy patients'.

Background Data: Little data exists regarding the effect of chronic preoperative tramadol abuse on the clinical outcomes after surgery. Lumbar discectomy is a very common procedure that has a predictably high success rate for relief of radicular pain. In addition, the patient population presenting for this procedure has a high propensity for preoperative narcotic use.

Surgical excision of symptomatic sacral perineurial Tarlov cyst: case series and review of the literature.

Object: Symptomatic sacral perineural cysts are extremely rare. The aim of this retrospective study is to investigate the outcome of 15 consecutive patients treated by microsurgical resection of the cyst and to review the literature.

Methods: The authors retrospectively reviewed their clinical data archive from 2002 to 2014.

Clinical outcomes of the Dynesys dynamic neutralization system: 1-year preliminary results.

Object: In this study the authors present the preliminary clinical outcomes of dynamic stabilization with the Dynesys spinal system as part of a multicenter randomized prospective Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigational device exemption (IDE) clinical trial.

Methods: This study included 101 patients from six IDE sites (no participants were omitted from the analysis) who underwent dynamic stabilization of the lumbar spine with the Dynesys construct. Patient participation was based on the presence of degenerative spondylolisthesis or retrolisthesis (Grade I), lateral or central spinal stenosis, and their physician's determination that the patient required decompression and instrumented fusion for one or two contiguous spinal levels between L-1 and S-1.