Spine Surgery
Advanced, innovative surgical spine care to reduce pain
Contact Us
Surgical Spine Care
If you are living with back pain after trying nonsurgical treatment options, spine surgery can help improve your quality of life.
The spine experts at Lahey Clinic offer the most advanced spine procedures. The Spine Center team is highly skilled in minimally invasive spine surgery and correcting spinal deformities. You get coordinated care from a team of specialists in neurosurgery, orthopedics, pain management and other specialties.
Types of Spine Surgeries
The Lahey spine care team offers expertise in a broad range of procedures:
- Discectomy: Your surgeon removes a herniated or ruptured disc from the neck or lower back. The procedure eliminates pain caused by a damaged disc pressing on nerve tissue. At Lahey, all discectomies use a minimally invasive approach.
- Disc replacement: In this innovative procedure, your surgeon replaces a damaged disc with an artificial mechanical disc. This preserves motion and avoids fusion.
- Fusion: Your surgeon joins together two or more vertebrae in the spine. This stabilizes that section of the spine.
- Laminectomy: Your surgeon removes bone in the back of the spine. This relieves pressure on the spinal cord or nerve roots. Laminectomy helps reduce leg pain caused by a herniated disc or spinal stenosis.
- Minimally invasive lumbar decompression: Called MILD, this procedure treats thickened ligaments. Spinal stenosis causes leg muscle fatigue and heaviness. This surgery is an alternative to epidural steroid injections and open spine surgery.
Specialized Spine Procedures
Your surgical treatment depends on your specific diagnosis. The Lahey spine care team offers many specialized procedures, including:
- Decompression for Chiari malformation
- Image-guided minimally invasive lumbar fusion surgery
- Microdiscectomy
- Microforaminotomy
- Minimally invasive laminectomy
- Spinal cord/nerve sheath tumor resection
- Spinal reconstructive surgery
- Spinal vascular malformations
- Tethered cord release
Intraoperative Monitoring
During your spine surgery, a neurophysiologist conducts intraoperative monitoring. This imaging and testing measures your spinal cord and nerve root function.
Advanced monitoring guides surgery and prevents injury to nerves and the spinal cord. You get a more accurate and precise surgical result.
A Team Approach
At the Spine Center, specialists from different fields work together to treat your condition. We create a complete plan focused on reducing pain and helping you move better.
Your team includes experts in:
If you are diagnosed with a complex condition, your care team can access a unique network. This group of spinal experts reviews complex cases. All experts decide together if you might be a candidate for a clinical trial.
More About Spine Surgery
Lahey spine surgeons are highly experienced in minimally invasive procedures. This approach uses small incisions instead of large openings to access the affected area.
During a spine surgery, your doctor makes small cuts in the back, chest or abdomen to reach the spine. Tiny cameras and instruments are inserted through these openings to complete the surgery.
Minimally invasive surgeries give you multiple benefits, including:
- Faster recovery.
- Less blood loss during surgery.
- Reduced pain after surgery.
- Shorter hospital stay.
- Smaller scars.
At Lahey, surgeons perform 50% of spinal fusion surgeries with minimally invasive techniques. This results in reoperation and infection rates much lower than national averages.
The minimally invasive spine surgeries we offer include:
- Laparoscopic fusion.
- Minimally invasive lumbar decompression.
- Percutaneous fixation.
- Spinal cord stimulation.
- Stereotactic radiosurgery.
- Thoracoscopic sympathectomy for hyperhidrosis (surgery to treat excessive sweating).
- Vertebroplasty.
You can develop a spine deformity in childhood or adulthood. These conditions worsen over time. Spine deformities can cause significant pain and a limited range of motion. A spine deformity can reduce your quality of life.
The Lahey spine team uses minimally invasive techniques to correct spine deformities and stabilize the spine.
Conditions that cause spine deformities include:
- Arthritis.
- Injury or trauma.
- Osteoporosis.
- Scoliosis.
You may feel only minor pain from a spine deformity and learn to live with it. If your spine continues to curve or your pain worsens, surgery can help.
Spine surgery provides excellent relief for many patients, including older adults.
Surgical teams at the Lahey Spine Center perform hundreds of spine procedures a year. This makes Lahey one of the busiest and most experienced spine surgery programs in Greater Boston.
You get excellent care. At Lahey, all spine surgeries are tracked in an outcomes registry. Results are publicly shared. Patients report a better quality of life and less disability compared to national averages.
Lahey has earned national recognition for its expertise in spine care, including as a:
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Center of Distinction.
- Optum Center of Excellence.
- Becker’s Hospital Review’s 100 Hospitals and Health Systems with Great Neurosurgery and Spine Programs.
Your spine team also leads national outcomes research. Lahey spine surgeons were key investigators on the federally sponsored (PCORI) CSM-S study. This research studied the anterior and posterior surgical approaches for spinal cord dysfunction from cervical myelopathy. This condition is caused by arthritis that puts pressure on the spinal cord.
The study found that both procedures improve symptoms. There were differences in recovery and complication rates.
You can be assured of excellent spine surgery care at Lahey. The spine team tracks and publicly shares data about our procedures. All spinal fusion and spinal deformity correction surgeries are recorded in the registry.
Benefits of an Outcomes Registry
Data collected in the registry provides insight to the spine care team. Lahey surgeons use this information to help improve outcomes and quality of life.
The registry helps the spine care team in the following ways:
- Understand the effectiveness of the spine care treatment provided
- Develop evidence-based information about the risks and benefits of spinal fusions
- Guide research in spinal fusions
- Provide valuable information on surgical outcomes to patients considering spinal surgery
Highlights of Post-Surgery Outcomes
Post-surgery outcomes recorded in the spinal fusion registry show infections and the need for reoperations at Lahey are low:
- 30-day infection rate: less than 1% (about half of the national average)
- 30-day reoperation rate: less than 1%
- 1-year reoperation rate: 0.04%
Increase in Quality of Life Following Spinal Fusion
Outcomes measures show that patients who undergo spinal fusion at Lahey report a better quality of life after surgery than those who have the same procedure at other hospitals nationwide.
Decrease in Disability Following Spinal Fusion
Registry data shows patients who receive spinal fusion at Lahey experience less disability after surgery than those who have the same procedure at other hospitals nationwide.
Neurosurgery Spinal Fusion Outcomes
All Lahey spinal fusion patient outcomes are measured and placed in the registry. We measure single- and two-level fusion outcomes with the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI).
A lower score is better. A post-operative score of less than 20, or 10 points lower than the pre-op score, indicates significant improvement or reduced pain.
The Lahey spine care team continuously works to improve spine care for you. Surgeons and other specialists study and develop new devices and approaches to improve patient outcomes.
The Lahey Spine Center has a long history of innovation, starting in 1986 with spinal fixation systems. This segmental fixation of the spine originally used the Cottrel-Dubousette system. Today, Lahey uses the more modern titanium system.
Other advancements include:
- Anterior lumbar interbody fusion for instability (studying two different cage techniques: the BAK screw-in style versus a titanium ring prosthesis).
- Lateral mass plate fixation of the cervical spine.
- Percutaneous discectomy for disc space infection and discal biopsy.
- Posterior lumbar interbody fusion using a new, low-profile cage compared to a standard bone graft fusion.
- Vertebroplasty for reconstruction of osteopenic compression fractures.
