[Spinal flexibility and activities of daily living for the thoracic and lumbar spinal cord injured--comparison of a non operated group with an internal spinal fused group].

There has been a great argument in selecting conservative treatment or surgical repair for the spinal cord injury as an early stage treatment. The purpose of medical treatment is to bring a patient back to the society as soon as possible by early intervention and rehabilitation, while preventing complications of the injury. We are faced with a difficulty in determining the superiority between conservative treatment and surgical repair, since no comparative statistical analysis has been available among various rehabilitation methods for the spinal cord injury. We treated 171 patients in the past with traumatic thoracic or lumbar spinal cord injury who were submitted to our hospital for the ADL training purposes. We selected and studied 34 complete paraplegic cases with no complications who started receiving ADL training within 2 months period after the injury from among these cases. (1) Non-ope group was superior in spinal flexibility to internally spinal fused group. (2) Non-ope group reached ADL independence 1.4 months earlier than I.S.F. in case of upper thoracic injury. ADL independence was reached almost at the same time in the lower thoracic injury cases by either treatment. Above all, it is concluded that conservative treatment is more helpful to establish rehabilitation in shorter length of time than surgical repair.