Title

Subtitle

Type your paragraph here.

Minor degrees of lumbar and cervical canal compromise are common with occasional symptoms and well tolerated by the patient with minimal medication and physical therapy. Moderate to severe degrees of spinal canal stenosis can be incapacitating and require surgical treatment to decompress the said nervous structures.

Surgery for Lumbar or Cervical Spinal Canal stenosis involves three steps. The first step or decompression involves removal of offending bone, ligament and disc material. There is an increasing trend to do this in a minimally invasvive nature. The second step is stabilization whereby the affected vertebrae are fixed with metallic implants to improve the stability of the spine. The third step is fusion which involves adding bone graft or additonal material to establish bony union between the affected vertebrae and thus get long term stability.

The bones, ligaments and discs of the spine constitute a unique "link" joint which is much like a long pipe with different sections which are assembled together.

The hollow canal within the vertebra which separted the anterior and posterior halves contain the spinal cord and spinal nerves within them. At the joints between the vertebra, a pair of spinal nerves exits on each side through a gap between the vertebra called the neural foramen.

With degeneration of the joints between the vertebra, there is some collapse of the intervertebral disc and the resulting coming together of the vertebrae , along with thickening of the ligaments and overgrowth of the bone create a situation whereby the space available within the canal and foramen is reduced, thereby compromising the nervous structures.

This condition causes a situation of chronic nerve dysfunction called spinal canal stenosis.

Since the vertebral joints are most mobile at the cervical and lumbar levels, most of the degenerative changes occur at these level and hence , the condition of spinal canal stenosis mostly involves the neck and the low back.

The chronic pressure on the nerves causes them to have dysfunction which presents as sensory and motor changes in the affected limbs and sometimes a unique phenomenon caused claudication whereby pain or numbness develops in the legs only on walking.