Abstract
The electrophysiological measurement of spinal cord evoked potentials (SCEPs) has been established as a tool for diagnosing the spinal level responsible for cervical myelopathy. Only a few studies, however, employed multimodal SCEPs for this purpose. The objective of this study was to investigate the correlation between multimodal SCEPs recorded during cervical laminoplasty and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) abnormalities in 18 patients aged 70 years and older versus 32 patients less than 65 years of age. Both the SCEPs and MRIs showed higher incidences of multiple-level cord involvement in the older group than in the younger group. Discrepancies in the spinal levels involved between the SCEPs and the MRIs were found in 12 patients (67%) for the older group and 6 patients (19%) for the younger group. The accuracy of the MR images in localizing the lesion site was significantly lower in the older group than in the younger group, indicating that MR images tend to show clinically silent cord compression in elderly patients. Because spinal cord compression can appear without functional change in elderly patients, electrophysiological evaluations with intraoperative multimodal SCEP studies are a useful addition to MRI for understanding the pathology of myelopathy.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
About this article
Cite this article
Tanaka, N., Fujimoto, Y., Yasunaga, Y. et al. Functional diagnosis using multimodal spinal cord evoked potentials in cervical myelopathy. J Orthop Sci 10, 3–7 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00776-004-0859-3
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00776-004-0859-3