Response to: Surgery-Related Complications and Sequelae in Management of Tuberculosis of Spine

Safak Ekinci; Faruk Akyildiz; Omer Ersen

doi:10.4184/asj.2015.9.1.153

Dear Editor,

We read the published article by Moon et al. [1] entitled "Surgery-Related Complications and Sequelae in Management of Tuberculosis of Spine" with great interest. The authors said "surgery should be reserved only for the complicated cases of spinal tuberculosis in patients for whom surgery is definitely indicated" [1].

However, we think that some more points should be discussed regarding therapy planning.

Spinal tuberculosis is the most common and the worst form of tuberculosis lesions in the skeleton [2,3,4]. If the lesion is limited within the vertebrae, and if there are no complications, triple-drug anti-tuberculous chemotherapy can be the main therapy to treat tuberculosis [5]. However, with proper indications, surgical procedures are superior in the prevention of neurological deterioration, maintenance of stability, and early recovery [3,4,5,6].

Oguz et al. [4] reported 76 cases with spinal tuberculosis resulted in excellent recoveries without any neurological deterioration. As a result, they developed an effective classification system named GATA.

We believe that this new classification system should be considered as a practical guide for spinal tuberculosis treatment planning in all countries.

Response to: Surgery-Related Complications and Sequelae in Management of Tuberculosis of Spine

Conflict of Interest

References