Progress of separation surgery in metastatic spine disease / 中华骨科杂志

ABSTRACT

Spinal metastases may cause pain,pathological fracture and/or neurological symptoms.The most common treatment of spinal metastases is conservative therapy.Surgical intervention is necessary when there are pathological and/or neurological deficits.Total en bloc spondylectomy (TES) has lower local recurrence rate and may be applicable to a patient with single metastatic tumor and a long survival expectancy,While debulking surgery is less risky and higher recurrence rate.Conventional radiotherapy is a kind of effective supplement to reduce the local recurrence rate in spinal metastases.However,the local dose is often failed to reach the effective dose because of the close connection of tumor and spinal cord and it is less effective for relatively radioresistant histologies.With the development of radiotherapy technology,spinal radiotherapy has become increasingly accurate to avoid of spinal cord injury.In addition,conventional radioresistant tumors has become treatable with high-dose stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT).At the same time,SBRT is also an important basis for the implementation of separation surgery of spinal metastases.Separation surgery is to separate the tumor and dura and achieve circumferential decompression and stabilization through posterior approach.As a result,a high-dose SBRT can be performed because of the small interspace to protect the spinal cord,which greatly reduces the local recurrence rate.Compared with TES,separation surgery combined with high-dose radiotherapy not only reduces the difficulty of surgery,but also has a good local control rate,which is a relatively "minimally invasive" strategy.Separation surgery is particularly suitable for patients with high-grade epidural spinal cord compression and moderately sensitive or insensitive to radiotherapy.Although the concept of separation surgery has been proposed for several years,only a few applications have been reported in foreign literature and fewer in domestic literature.This article aims to summarize the relevant concepts and clinical applications of separation surgery in spine metastases and to provide a reference for the treatment of spinal metastases.