Advances and Challenges in Spine Surgery

Dear Colleagues,

Spine surgery has undergone tremendous advancement in the past several decades. We have gained a much deeper understanding of how to approach the spine while minimizing trauma to the normal tissue, how to stabilize the spine respecting the natural spine biomechanics, and how to maintain or restore optimal spine alignment when performing reconstructive spine surgeries. Significant technological advancements have reshaped how we treat spinal ailments. Modern segmental fixation and hardware technologies have allowed more secure and stable spinal fixation. The refinement of spinal navigation has helped spine surgeons place hardware more safely and with greater accuracy. The innovations in biological material technology have greatly facilitated successful bony healing and fusion after spine surgery.

We have started to gain a better understanding of the pathophysiology of the origin of back pain. In addition, we have also begun to understand the molecular changes occurring after spinal cord injury and the basic molecular process involved in spinal axon regeneration. 

There are still plenty of challenges facing us in spine surgery. How to decrease the rate of disc degeneration and minimize discogenic back pain, how to accurately determine the etiologies of various kinds of back pain, how to preserve spinal motion and physiological flexibility with spinal instrumentation, how to avoid adjacent level disease with spinal fusion, and how to minimize delayed iatrogenic spinal instability with spinal decompression are all examples of the issues facing spine surgeons on a daily basis. In addition, spinal cord injury remains one of the most challenging and unresolved issues in modern neuroscience. We have yet to find an effective treatment to reverse the functional loss for patients suffering from severe spinal cord injury. 

The current Special Issue will present the most up-to-date advances in spine surgery, discuss our new understanding of the pathophysiology of the spine and spinal cord biology, and introduce the challenges that remain to be solved in spine surgery.

Dr. Yi Lu
Prof. Dr. Micheal Wang
Guest Editors

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