Impact of incidental thoracic spinal stenosis on outcomes following lumbar fusion: propensity score-matched cohort study
Jeremy Tze En Lim, Ashton Kai Shun Tan, Shi Ting Chiu, Christian Hwee Yee Heng, Yee Gen Lim, Marcus Zhixing Ling, Reuben Chee Cheong Soh, Lei Jiang · 2026
Read Impact of incidental thoracic spinal stenosis on outcomes following lumbar fusion: propensity score-matched cohort study by Jeremy Tze En Lim, Ashton Kai Shun Tan, Shi Ting Chiu, Christian Hwee Yee Heng, Yee Gen Lim, Marcus Zhixing Ling, Reuben Chee Cheong Soh, Lei Jiang (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13458823.txt.
Description
Jeremy Tze En Lim and colleagues ask whether a silent narrowing of the thoracic spine, spotted incidentally on imaging, should worry patients headed for lumbar fusion. Whole-spine scans increasingly reveal such tandem stenosis, yet its meaning for surgery aimed lower down is unclear. Their 2026 propensity-matched cohort study, drawn from a tertiary center's 2010 to 2023 registry, pairs 27 affected patients with matched controls and tracks pain, disability, and quality-of-life scores to two years.
Both groups improved, and no score separated them at six months or two years, so the incidental finding did not blunt the lumbar operation's benefit. The caution lives in the follow-up: nine of the 27 stenosis patients, a third, needed thoracic surgery, against none of the controls. The authors advise against prophylactic thoracic operations based on pictures alone, but equally against dismissing the finding as benign; neurological surveillance, they argue, is the proportionate response.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jeremy Tze En Lim, Ashton Kai Shun Tan, Shi Ting Chiu, Christian Hwee Yee Heng, Yee Gen Lim, Marcus Zhixing Ling, Reuben Chee Cheong Soh, Lei Jiang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 39843 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |