[Spinal cord complications in the surgery of spinal deviations. Apropos of 24 cases]

The authors review 24 medullary complications which they encountered while treating scoliosis and kyphosis over a period of 8 years. They studied separatly the complications encountered in the pure kyphosis and those encountered in the scoliosis. 7 medullary complications occured while treating pure kyphosis, 5 Potts disease, 1 achondroplasia and 1 Morquio disease. All the kyphosis were of importance with a mean curve over 100 degrees. In 6 cases the medullary symptoms occurred during elongation prior any surgery. The authors distinguished between Pott disease where the symptoms occurred after minimal reductions and the chondrodysplasia where the symptoms occurred after important reductions. Thus the stiff Pott kyphosis where elongation results in medullary symptoms because of medullar compression before any correction, appears to be different from reductible kyphosis where the strong medullary tension is responsible for the symptoms. Two complications occurred after a vertebral osteotomy one immediatly and one after an elongation of a pelvic halo.