A Lacklustre Year for ADR Clinical Research

[Espoire]

I'm sure everyone on this forum is interested in the progress of innovative treatments for spine problems, ADR in particular. My impression was that the boom in research over the last few years had tapered off a bit recently, and so I looked at PubMed which lists medical publications and allows searches.

Looking at "clinical studies" of "spine disc replacement" there were only 7 studies published in 2010. (Changing the search words didn't make much difference). This is down from a high of 20 studies in 2008. (Compare to 239 studies for rheumatoid arthritis in 2010). This is not good news for patients looking for information to help make decisions about surgery, or to support insurance claims.

Both the 2-level Prestige-LP trial and the 2-level Mobi-c trial apparently completed patient follow-up in 2010, so hopefully the results will be reported soon. Let's hope 2011 is a happy new year for spine research.

Dave