Experimental Study Of The Acute Effect Of Spinal Shortening After Vertebrectomy On Spinal Function And Blood Flow

Objective: Vertebrectomy has its obvious advantages in the surgery of spinal deformity correction. But it is inevitable for vertebrectomy that the shortening of the spinal canal will lead to the shortening of the spinal cord because of the traction of nerve roots and epidural ligamentum, which restrict the retraction of spinal cord into the adjacent canal. And this can cause mechanical injury to spinal cord directly and increment of interspinal pressure. The secondary injury can be aroused by the decrease of spinal cord blood flow (SCBF), which is the result of increased interspinal pressure. Now researches on this topic are rare, and no ideal animal model is available. To investigate the effect of spinal shortening on the spinal function and blood flow, we establish a circumspinal vertebrectomy animal model to define the safe range of vertebectomy.Method: 40 Zelanian rabbits were divided into 5 groups at random. Group A was the control group, which underwent circumspinal vertebrectomy without docking. Groups B, C, D, E were experimental groups, the distances of vertebrectomy of which were 5mm, 7.5mm, 10mm, 12.5mm respectively. After the accomplishment of vertebrectomy, the two ends of osteotomy were docked with tailor-made docking device. The somatosensory evoked potentials (SEP) and transcranial magnetic stimulation motor evoked potentials (TMS-MEP) were administered all through the procedure and data were collected.The animals were executed after 6 hours' observation. Blood vessels casting preferred to the harvesting of spinal cord samples. The micropictures of the spinal...