A prospective study of functional outcome of lumbar diseases treated with single level instrumented posterior lumbar interbody fusion

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction: Low back pain is one of the most commonly reported problems in the world. The most common causes are injury or overuse, pressure on neural tissue from different pathologies (disc herniation, stenosis, degenerative disc disease, listhesis etc.). Spinal fusion is essentially a " welding " process. The basic idea is to fuse together the painful vertebrae so that they heal into a single, solid bone. The theory being that if the painful vertebrae do not move, they should not hurt. Posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) is done to obtain interbody vertebral fusion through a posterior approach. The advantage of PLIF over anterior lumbar interbody fusion(ALIF) is the avoidance of vascular and reproductive system complications that can occur with anterior lumbar surgery.