Pune hospital conducts spine stenting procedure to treat fracture

Led by Dr Shailesh Hadgaonkar, chief of the Spine and Neuroscience unit at the hospital, two procedures were recently performed on a 51-year-old woman and an 82-year-old woman.

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A team of doctors at Sancheti Hospital, Pune conducted a spine stenting procedure called Vertebral Body Stenting (VBS) under the supervision of the spinal navigation tool ‘O-Arm’, the hospital authorities said on Wednesday. They added that this was the first such instance in western India.

Led by Dr. Shailesh Hadgaonkar, chief of the Spine and Neuroscience unit at the hospital, two procedures were recently performed on a 51-year-old woman and an 82-year-old woman.

Dr Hadgaonkar told reporters on Wednesday that the patients had spinal fractures with X-Ray reports and MRI scans clearly showing broken spines. “This was the cause of unbearable pain in both the patients who were not able to stand or sit or carry on with any movement. The 82-year-old woman was also a heart patient and had an angioplasty done previously. We tried to relieve her of pain with medications and injections due to her age but the pain kept worsening. We then decided to conduct Vertebral Body Stenting,” Dr Hadgaonkar said.

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VBS is a minimally invasive reconstructive treatment for vertebral body fractures. In this procedure, a balloon is placed in the spine to be expanded followed by a stent and sealed with cement. In this case, local anaesthesia was given and the procedure was conducted under the supervision of the high-tech navigation tool O-Arm which enables the placement of cement at the exact location and makes scans possible in real-time.

Post operation, there was pain relief and both the patients could walk, Dr Hadgaonkar said, adding that generally, the other options include cement injections (vertebroplasty) and fixing with screws. “In these cases, the level of collapse was high, and injecting cement would have been difficult. Also, the age of the patients was a factor; they could not have undergone surgeries,” he added.