Current Research Projects
Geriatric spinal cord injury
Recent studies have reported an increase in the number of elderly people who are sustaining spinal cord injury (SCI).
In the elderly, these injuries often occur in the cervical spine, they often occur in the setting of degenerative spine
disease and they often occur in the absence of identifiable fracture or other radiographic abnormality. For this reason,
they are often classified as spinal cord injuries without radiographic abnormality (SCIWORA). The biomechanics of SCIWORA
in the elderly have not been studied and, as a result, the motions or degenerative features that increase the risk of SCI
in this group is unknown. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of spinal degeneration on the risk of SCI
in the elderly cervical spine using an experimental approach and cadaveric porcine and human cervical spine specimens (C2-T1).
Degenerative features are simulated on porcine specimens using silicone blocks inserted in the spinal canal.
The human specimens are obtained from elderly donors with advanced spinal degeneration. Physiologic and traumatic
bending moments are applied to the specimens with simulated muscle forces and head weight. A radio-opaque surrogate
spinal cord is used to document the deformation of a radio-opaque physical surrogate model of the spinal cord. An
optoelectronic motion analysis system will measure the vertebral kinematics. The relationship between spinal cord
compression, vertebral kinematics and degenerative feature size is measured. From this information it may be possible
to develop clinical screening techniques to identify people with high-risk levels of spinal or disc degeneration. The
ability to develop prevention or protective strategies such as clincal or environmental interventions that could be
used to protect at-risk people (e.g prophylactic stabilization, targeted physiotherapy) may also result from this research.
This project is in collaboration with the Injury Biomechanics Laboratory, Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Orthopaedics (James Boak, B.A.Sc.) and the Department of Orthopaedics (Dina Popovic, M.D., Eyal Itshayak, M.D., Marcel Dvorak, M.D.) at the University of British Columbia. Synaptic also acknowledges financial support for this work from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship.