Radiologic Assessment of Lumbar Intervertebral Instability and Degenerative Spondylolisthesis

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Definition

In 1985, Kirkaldy-Willis,43 as the president of the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine, in an introductive lecture during a symposium on lumbar spine instability raised three difficult questions: (1) what does the term lumbar instability mean, (2) how can it be detected, and (3) what are the best ways of treating varying degrees of this stage in the process of degeneration of the lumbar spine? Fourteen years later, and despite a large number of studies dealing with lumbar

Definition

Spondylolisthesis is easier to define than spinal instability. Etymologically, this term means “vertebral slipping.” The so-called olisthetic vertebra slips along the underlying vertebra. Junghanns39 first differentiated the degenerative spondylolisthesis from the spondylolytic type; afterward he noticed on cadaveric specimens that the vertebral slip was not always associated with a neural arch discontinuity. Because this type of vertebral slipping mainly occurs in the elderly,42 Newman and

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