Chapters Transcript Video New Treatment Options for Children With Scoliosis Scoliosis in the most simple form is a curved spine. In reality, it's a little bit more complicated because the spine is not only curved but it's twisted. And that's important because it one makes somebody look bad, like they have a big hump in their back and two, it twists around the lungs. So it compromises someone's ability to take a full breath. The more common type of scoliosis is teenage scoliosis, which is called adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. That is what people are generally screened for in schools. And that's the most common reason why a patient is referred to a specialist for scoliosis. Most of the time when someone has scoliosis, they don't even know they have it because there's no symptoms, there's no pain, there's no other issues going on except they start to notice that their body looks just a little bit sideways or maybe one shoulder is a little bit higher or maybe one side of the chest protrudes a little bit. So it's actually quite subtle. The body changes that take place over time and the lack of pain or other problems often mean that the scoliosis is not diagnosed for years. The idea is, you don't cause a fusion. You allow motion, you allow growth. And what happens is you take a curve and around the outside of the curve, you basically put in screws in a rope and then you allow the inside of the curve to grow and the outside doesn't grow and it straightens. Now, sometimes it works. But most of the time it doesn't, there's only two options to treat scoliosis that are scientifically proven. Now, one is surgery and that's the last resort, any teenager or person in their early twenties, if the curve is over 45 to 50 degrees, surgery should be considered unless there's extenuating circumstances. What we want to do is prevent the need for surgery. The other is bracing and what a brace does in general is stops the scoliosis from progressing. There really is some new understanding of bracing that's come out in recent studies. So one wearing a brace just at nighttime does some good. Now it's better to wear it during the daytime too. But it's understandable that many time patients don't want to wear a brace to school and it's probably better to wear it at night and not wear it at all. From a recent study, we learned that in patients who are less than 10 years old, even with a small amount of scoliosis, like 15 or 20 degrees starting part time bracing night only can actually reverse or improve the scoliosis. So we are now more aggressive in a good way about trying to prevent the scoliosis from getting to the point where you need surgery or even when you need to wear a brace to school as a teenager. Created by
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