Anas Ahmed, Lal Rehman, Farrukh Javeed, Iram Bokhari, Sehrish Altaf, Arfa Qasim.
Comparison of the Outcomes of Anterior versus Posterior Approaches in Multilevel Cervical Prolapsed Intervertebral Discs.
Pak J Neuro Surg Jan ;27(1):35-41.

Objective: To compare outcomes of the anterior versus posterior approach in multilevel cervical prolapsed intervertebral discs. Materials and Methods: This is a prospective study conducted on 40 patients, 20 in each group in the Department of Neurosurgery of a tertiary care hospital. Group A patients were operated on by the anterior cervical approach and Group B was operated by the posterior cervical approach. Postoperatively all the patients were followed to assess the outcome, neurological deficit. Results: Mean age in Group A was 38 years while in Group B, it was 53 years. Group A had 65% male and 35% female patients while Group B had 60% male and 40% female patients. In Group A, 9 (45%) patients had radiculopathy while 11 (55%) patients had myelopathy, while in Group B 7 (35%) developed radiculopathy, and 13 (65%) patients developed myelopathy. We assessed the patients postoperatively and found that in Group A, 18 (90%) patients were improved and 2 (10%) patients had clinically shown worse outcomes. While in Group B, 15 (75%) patients had improvement, and 5 (25%) patients had worse outcomes. Conclusion: The anterior approach had a short hospital stay and early recovery which makes it a more commonly used procedure by surgeons as compared to the posterior approach the outcome results of our study also showed that the anterior approach was good and had better functional outcomes than the posterior approach, but the difference was not significant statistically.

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