ADRSupport Community - Sleep Apnea "Cervical Spinal Stenosis"

Hi Fortitudine:

Thanks for the words of encouragement. You are so lucky that you can maintain a reasonable QOL while staving off invasive procedures!

In talking to 3 and 4 level c-spine ADR recipients, they indicated there was little psychological or sleep disturbance prior to surgery. In some cases there was pain and mechanical dysfunction. In one case a patient was within days of quadraplegia w/extensive muscle wasting, and yet until he had an MRI he was oblivious to his precarious situation. He luckily managed to save his life literally overnight via 4 level c-spine ADR. Generally the ADR folks I've spoken to have been very rational w/solid affect considering the trauma of spine disease.

Interestingly in 2005 there have been a spate of articles in the literature dealing w/the relationship between c-spine compression, the brain-stem and CFS/FMS for example. google: hypoperfusion. So science seems to be "catching" up.

Here is an intriguing statement:
"...myelomalacia complicate(s) the treatment but certainly (it) is a concern on the compression your cervical spine is doing to the medulla ...a kind of another indication for surgical treatment indication." Dr. Luiz Pimenta.

Who BTW is a generous and contentious practitioner,
and IMHO one of the "overlooked" master surgeons in the ADR space. His cervical ADR is the PCM.

Surgeons deal w/mechanical failures not "psychological" ones.

The brain-stem is essential to life and is a highly complex interface between the brain and the spine cord. How does the medulla "express" "mild" distress of the kind produced by the "traction"/"compression" constantly being applied by c-spine central stenosis? Is the evidence of disease simply provided by overt physical symptoms/losses or are there subtler manifestions of c-spine pathologyy?

As you say Fortitudine: "...the spine is really one of the new frontiers."

So I guess we're all pioneers/guinea pigs in this together.

Take care.