Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

Award for spinal surgery

RECOGNITION: Ganga Hospital Director S. Rajasekaran (second right) receives the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association’s award from its president Myung-Sang Moon at a conference held in South Korea recently.

COIMBATORE: The Ganga Hospital here has won the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association (APOA) Spine Award for a new surgical procedure in correcting hunch back that is caused by spinal tuberculosis.

Hospital Director and Head of the Department of Orthopaedics and Spine Surgery S. Rajasekaran said in a release that the award was presented to him at South Korea’s capital Seoul recently during the APOA Triennial Congress. The association met once in three years and the award was given to significant innovations.

Dr. Rajasekaran, who is also president of the World Orthopaedic Concern, said there were nearly three million active spinal tuberculosis patients in the world. Nearly half of them were from the Indian sub-continent, especially children. The tuberculosis bacteria ate the bone rapidly and this resulted in the collapse of the spine. This collapse continued even after the disease was fully cured, in fact till the growth period of the children was completed.

Some of these children could get a curve as severe as 140 degrees. When the curve increased touched or crossed 90 degrees, there was severe interference with normal physiology and the children become breathless and developed cardiac problems. Some of them could also get a neurological deficit and paralysis of the legs due to stretching of the spinal cord over the deformed spine.

Surgical correction of this deformity was done only in very few centres in the world because of inherent risk in surgery. The previously available procedures were multi-staged ones. An affected child had to be operated in different stages, one from the back and also from the front. These surgical procedures involved the chest cavity also. Morbidity and mortality were very high. Many of them had to spend a prolonged period in the intensive care unit and the cost of the entire treatment was also very high.

The procedure at Ganga Hospital involved the correction of the deformity in a single stage and from behind without the need to open up the chest cavity.

This reduced hospital stay considerably and cut the cost of the surgery by more than four times. Most importantly, the safety of the surgery was very high.

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