Evaluation of Patients Operatively Treated With a Diagnosis of Lumbar Disc Hernia: an Epidemiological Investigation

Abstract

Lower back and leg pain is a common condition in the community which leads to loss of work and restricts daily life activities. About 2-3% of all painful lower back syndromes are caused by lumbar disc herniation (LDH). Surgery is performed in patients with sensory and motor deficits and the patients which are not responding to physical and medical treatment. In this study, we retrospectively evaluated the LDH patients that were operatively treated in our clinic through the review of the literature and the study was aimed to provide contribution to epidemiological studies. The retrospective study included 190 patients who were operatively treated between January 2013 and December 2015. Age, gender, level of herniation, neurological examination findings, presence of trauma, length of hospital stay, profession, recurrence, and surgical outcome were evaluated in all patients. The 190 patients included 108 (56.8%) males and 82 (43.2%) females with a mean age of 45 years. Mean length of hospital stay was 1.8 days. The level of herniation was L4-5 (51.6%), L5-S1 (32.1%) with a rate of 83.7%. Preoperative foot drop was found in 2.1% of the patients. Of these, 50% of them were improved and 50% of them sustained foot drop following the surgery. Lumbar disc herniation is one of the most common spine surgeries performed. Appropriate surgical procedure with an accurate diagnosis leads to good success rates and high patient satisfaction. Following the surgery, 122 patients were graded as “perfect”, 50 patients as “good”, 15 patients as “moderate”, and 3 patients as “poor”. These findings were consistent with the findings of the literature. © 2017, Yuzuncu Yil Universitesi Tip Fakultesi. All rights reserved.