Worldwide prevalence of Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is ranging from 233 to 755 per million inhabitants, whereas reported incidence lies between 10.4 and 83 per million inhabitants per year. Thus, the socioeconomic impact of SCI associated with cervical trauma is high enough to be encountered within one of the most important worries in vast majority of developed countries.
The ability to predict recovery following SCI is of paramount importance to the physician's role in providing the best care and guidance to patients and families during the illness. Diagnosis of cervical spine injury is an essential aspect of the trauma evaluation. This task is especially difficult in patients whose clinical examination is not reliable due to distracting painful injuries, intoxication, or concomitant head injury. For this population the use of radiological imaging is essential. Among those studies, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become an essential tool in diagnosis and management in cervical spine injury after trauma, published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 5, 2014).
Article: " Ligaments disruption: a new perspective in the prognosis of spinal cord injury" by Rafael Martinez-Perez1, 2, Luis Jimenez-Roldan1, 2, Alfonso Lagares1, 2 (1 Department of Neurosurgery of Hospital 12 de Octubre, Madrid, Spain; 2 Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Faculty of Medicine, Madrid, Spain)
Martinez-Perez R, Jimenez-Roldan L, Lagares A. Ligaments disruption: a new perspective in the prognosis of spinal cord injury. Neural Regen Res. 2014;9(5):456-457.