Clinical Effectiveness of Minimally Invasive Surgery on Spinal Trauma

AIM: Minimally invasive spinal trauma surgery includes percutaneous pedicle screw fixation and miniature open anterolateral retractorbased approaches, which can improve surgical outcomes by reducing blood loss, operative time, and postoperative pain. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the effect of minimally invasive surgery on pain scores, functional recovery, and postoperative complications in patients with spinal trauma. METHODS: This retrospective study included 100 spinal trauma patients treated in Suzhou Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine between May 2019 and May 2022. Patients who underwent traditional open surgery were included in the traditional group, and those who received percutaneous pedicle screw internal fixation combined with posterior minimally invasive small incision decompression were included in the research group, each comprising 50 patients. The effectiveness of these two surgical approaches was determined by assessing their outcome measures, including surgery-related indices, postoperative pain, spinal morphology, functional recovery, and postoperative complications. RESULTS: Minimally invasive surgery was associated with significantly shorter surgical wounds, length of hospital stay, operative time, and postoperative time-lapse before off-bed activity, and less intraoperative hemorrhage volume and postoperative drainage volume compared to open surgery (p < 0.001). Compared to open surgery, patients with minimally invasive surgery showed significantly lower visual analogue scale (VAS) scores at 3 days, 3 months, and 6 months after surgery and lower Oswestry dysfunction index (ODI) at 7 days and 3 months after surgery (p <0.05). Furthermore, the difference in the spine morphology between the two arms did not achieve statistical significance (p > 0.05). Additionally, minimally invasive surgery resulted in a significantly lower incidence of postoperative complications than open surgery (p <0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Minimally invasive surgery causes less surgical damage for patients with spinal trauma, improves surgery-related indexes, alleviates postoperative pain, and provides better morphological and functional recovery of the spine.