What to do about degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis?

Degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis is a common clinical disease symptom. When the disease develops to a certain extent, it will seriously affect the patient's daily life, ranging from mobility problems to paralysis in bed. Therefore, if you suffer from this disease, you must pay close attention to the development of the disease, adjust the treatment plan in time, and strengthen care and prevention in daily life.

Symptoms of degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis

Low back and leg pain caused by degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis is one of the common diseases among middle-aged and elderly people, seriously affecting the quality of life of patients. The main manifestation is intermittent claudication, that is, numbness, swelling, pain, weakness and other symptoms in one or both lower limbs after walking 100-500 meters, and the patient needs to squat or bend over to rest for a while before walking again; sometimes numbness or insensitivity occurs on the outer side of the calf, dorsum of the foot, and toes.

Treatment of degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis

If the above symptoms occur, you should go to the orthopedics department of the hospital, take an X-ray of the waist to understand the stability of the lumbar spine and the condition of bone hyperplasia or porousness; do an MRI of the lumbar spine to understand the severity of lumbar spinal stenosis, and if necessary, do an electromyogram of the lower limbs to rule out neurogenic diseases.

For patients with mild lumbar spinal stenosis (walking more than 1 km, the above symptoms occasionally occur, and the symptoms disappear after rest), conservative treatment or observation can be used; for moderate to severe patients (moderate walking less than 500 meters, severe walking less than 100 meters), generally speaking, conservative treatment is not effective and surgical treatment is required. The surgical method is to expand and decompress the narrow spinal canal and nerve root canal, and at the same time perform bone grafting to stabilize the unstable lumbar vertebral segments.

Is surgical treatment of degenerative lumbar spinal stenosis valuable?

Some patients are afraid of lumbar surgery, fearing paralysis after the operation. In fact, modern orthopedics is developing rapidly, especially the technology of spinal surgery has achieved qualitative development: the operating room hardware of tertiary hospitals is almost the same as that of world-class hospitals. The application of high-quality electrosurgical units, clear C-arm fluoroscopy machines and advanced orthopedic instruments have laid the foundation for the success of the operation. Multi-level academic exchanges and professional training of doctors have greatly improved the level and quality of surgery. Generally speaking, the satisfaction rate of surgery should be over 90%, and the chances of accidents and paralysis are very low. Of course, patients should choose the hospital and the right doctor!