Emerson RG's article published in the latest issue of Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology must be an eye opener for Naysayer neurologists and to those skeptic spine specialists out there who is impetuously discredit the predictability values and reliability of intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring. My own personal IONM experience provided to more than 1500 surgical procedures reveal even more than 99.6% accuracy of detection, wherein about 4-5 spine patients lives been saved (four lumbar and cervical fusion spine cases, and one scoliosis procedure) because of the timely warning from the IONM results during the surgical procedures, the timely warning enabled surgeon to take immediate intervention measures to reverse the risk of permanent damage thereby saved the patient from paralysis.The number of years accounted in this study, and the number of patients who underwent surgical procedures used for this analysis of Dr.Emerson's study is compelling and producing an authoritative findings. It is a must have clinical paper for all those who work in IONM field and a great reference source to be given to those naysayers.
J Clin Neurophysiol. 2012 Apr;29(2):149-50.
NIOM for spinal deformity surgery: there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Emerson RG. Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: This was a 23-year retrospective study of 3436 consecutive pediatric orthopedic spinal surgery patients between 1995 and 2008.
OBJECTIVE: To demonstrate the effectiveness of multimodality electrophysiologic monitoring in reducing the incidence of iatrogenic neurologic deficit in a pediatric spinal surgery population.