At the 12th Annual Spine, Orthopedic and Paine Management-Driven ASC Conference in Chicago on June 12, Scott Hodges, DO, a cervical and lumbar specialist at the Center for Sports Medicine and Orthopedics in Chattanooga, Tenn., reviewed research on minimally invasive spine surgery. "Clearly, MIS can achieve anything open surgery can achieve, and, at times, we even see better outcomes," he said. Here are three key findings he shared from various studies.
1. Minimally invasive surgery leads to less blood loss. A 2013 study published in Spine on the five-year outcomes of MIS versus open transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion found blood loss for MIS was 127 milliliters, compared with 405 for open surgery.
2. MIS has comparable complication rates to open surgery. A study on minimal access versus open TILF published in December 2010 in Spine, involving a meta-analysis of 23 studies of 1,028 patients, found the complication rate for MIS was 7.5 percent, compared with 12.6 percent for the open complication rate.
3. Length of stay and cost are reduced by MIS. The 2013 study of five-year outcomes also found length of stay was 8.5 for MIS, compared with 24.2 for open surgery. Another study published in the Journal of Spinal Disorders & Techniques in 2012 found the length of stay was 3.4 days for MIS and 4.03 days for open. Furthermore, the study found MIS resulted in savings of $2,106 per patient, mainly due to reduced length of stay and lower pharmacy and lab costs.
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