[Effect of neuroelectrophysiological changes on the clinical manifestations and surgical outcomes of lumbar degenerative diseases].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effects of electromyography on the clinical manifestations and prognosis after posterior lumbar interbody fusion(PLIF) of degenerative lumbar diseases. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was performed on 68 patients with degenerative lumbar diseases, including 29 males and 39 females, aged 21 to 84 years old, who underwent electromyogram (EMG) from January 2018 to October 2019. The patients were divided into negative and positive groups according to whether theresults of EMG was normal or abnormal, PLIF surgery was performed in both groups. The preoperative duration of illness, postoperative recovery time, operative time, intraoperative blood loss, postoperative ambulation time and length of postoperative hospital stay were recorded. The clinical efficacy was evaluated by visual analogue scale(VAS) of low back and lower limb, the Japanese Orthopedic Association(JOA) score before and after operation. RESULTS: All patients were follow-up from 26 to 39 months. The subjective symptoms, clinical signs, daily activities and JOA total scores after operation in two groups were significantly higher than those before preoperation(P<0.05);the clinical signs score and total JOA score in the negative group at 3 months after operation were higher than those in the positive group(P<0.05). The VAS score of leg pain in the negative group after 1 and 3 months was less than that in the positive group(P<0.05). Patients 's illness time, postoperative recovery time, hospitalization time and implantation time in the negative group were shorter than those in the positive group(P<0.05). At other time points, there was no significant difference in low pain VAS, leg pain VAS, JOA scores in the two groups(P>0.05). There was no significant difference in the operation time and intraoperative bleeding volume between the two groups(P>0.05). CONCLUSION: Patients with normal electromyography had shorter disease duration than ones with abnormal electromyography in lumbar degenerative disease;after PLIF, patients with normal electromyography recovered faster than ones with abnormal electromyography, but the results of electromyography had no effect on the final prognosis of PLIF surgery.

Up-regulation of long noncoding RNA CCAL predicts poor patient prognosis and promotes tumor metastasis in osteosarcoma.

BACKGROUND: Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play essential roles in tumor progression. Aberrant colorectal cancer-associated lncRNA (CCAL) has been found in colorectal cancer. However, the function of lncRNA CCAL in osteosarcoma (OS) remains unclear. METHODS: Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was performed to measure CCAL expression in OS tissues and adjacent nontumor tissues. The correlation betweent CCAL expression and clinicopathological features and prognosis was also analyzed. In addition, the function of CCAL was further evaluated by cell proliferation, migration and invasion assays. RESULTS: We showed that CCAL was significantly up-regulated in OS tissues compared with adjacent nontumor tissues. Increased expression of CCAL was correlated with advanced TNM stage and metastasis. Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated that patients with high CCAL expression had lower overall survival than those with low CCAL expression. Multivariate Cox regression analysis indicated that CCAL expression might be an independent prognostic factor for OS patients. In addition, functional assays showed that decreased CCAL expression could inhibit OS cell proliferation, migration and invasion ability. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggested that CCAL plays critical roles in OS progression and could act as a therapeutic target in the treatment of OS.