Pioneering surgery trialled in Oswestry could be used elsewhere

The ground breaking technique currently being trialled at Oswestry's Orthopaedic Hospital should be offered to patients nationwide, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has said today.

The new procedure to fuse two vertebrae together, which is offered to reduce serious back pain, involves operating through a person's side, rather than the stomach or back, in order to reduce the patient's recovery period.

This new surgery is known as extreme lateral interbody fusion (XLIF).

Spinal surgery to fuse bones in the lower back in order to alleviate long-term pain is usually carried out through the stomach or from the back, however this runs the risk of trauma through damaging major blood vessels, or organs such as the bowel, and the spinal nerves.

Matthew Ockendon, spinal surgeon at the hospital, has been trialling the new XLIF technology for a year.

He said: "There are some patients for whom the only option is to stiffen part of the spine to stop the movement, perhaps to get the pressure off nerves, to help leg pain, perhaps to help with back pain symptoms and for those patients what we look for always is a way to do this doing minimal damage to let them rehabilitate quickly and get back to their lives.

"We take two vertebrae that would have moved as separate entities when you're younger perhaps or before injury, then stiffen it to stop the movement which is causing the pain. Once they've had the surgery done, it's a small proportion of the total movement so I think they do probably notice a difference.

"The hope is absolutely that their pain is significantly better."

Mr Ockendon said the new technique not only reduces pain but it would also mean patients would not be left with long cuts from the alternative surgery.

He said: "Traditionally and the way I was trained was to go through the tummy, moving the bowels out the way and all that sort of thing to get to the spine, and obviously that's a big operation, and patients are left with a big, long cut, a fair amount of time in hospital to get over that or to go from the back and again, be left with a big, long cut, moving all those muscles in order to get to the spine, causing some damage and then you have to heal from that.

"It's a perfectly good way to do the operation but if you could spare that and avoid all that trauma of the surgery by sneaking in through the keyhole approach, it's still a serious operation but we are doing it in a way that's less damaging."

In recent months Oswestry's Orthopaedic Hospital has appointed two new spinal surgeons, bringing its total to eight.