ADR with facet hypertrophy.
 

Hello,

Question from folks who have spoken to many doctors and have had surgery. I see very often doctors do NOT want to do Cervical ADR when you have facet degeneration and spurring.

Has anyone had cervical ADR with these type of symptoms? any other comments along this line would be great since some article say disks potentially could fail when having this.

I have multi-level issues C5-C7 C3-c4

Thanks for listening
Eric

Hi Eric,

I did not have any facet joint issues; however, I would imagine docs would do ACDF in this instance. Perhaps not even to prevent the discs from failing, but rather, your facet pain would not go away even if you had all of the bad discs replaced. I'm not a doc... just my opinion.

Disks or ADRs fail - unlikely

As Jeepbrew suggests, the presence of facet hypertrophy would suggest that you could get ADR surgery and not have your pain fully resolve

Depends
 

It depends on the hypertrophy severity. Dr. Clavel told me that if it's only mild to moderate you may still be a candidate. the only real way to find out for sure is to send your films. Best wishes...

true
 

it may not resolve all, but restoration of disk space and stability can help a lot. I had bone on bone with my C6/7. My quality of life is improved by 80%

I was reading one of Dr. Todd Lanman's articles about ADRs for people with facet degeneration. I'm paraphrasing, but he said that people with mild to moderate issues can still get ADR. He's actually reversed fusions with people who have healthy facets. You can always denerve the facets as well. I'd call up the Texas Back Institute for hit up Dr. Lanman in Beverly Hills. TBI uses Mobi-C and Prodisc, and Lanman uses the Prestige LP. Both places can do multilevel ADR if you need it.

Unless you want the M6, it may be cheaper to just do it in the States, at least with TBI.

There have been people who had mild to moderate damage who's facet degeneration actually reversed to some degree and, not only resolved their pain, but also improved the facet condition. There's also people who've gone down hill post-ADR having started with mild to moderate degeneration. It's a crapshoot and the further beyond mild you get, your odds for fully addressing your pain get worse; they just don't drop to zero.

look at bert facet replacement system a few here has them with excellent results looks like little springs

AnnaPurna sums up this complex nicely. And here are some good tech articles on grading the severity of facet arthrosis (there are several):

https://www.adrsupport.org/forums/sh...acet+arthrosis

Mild facet arthrosis is generally OK and not a contraindication. Overseas, they are more accepting and liberal -- because they can be. As well, if things go wrong, it's on the patient and not the doctor.