Does vertebroplasty work?

Filed in archive Treatment on August 28, 2005

The NY Times looks at the questions surrounding vertebroplasty:

No one is sure why it helps, or even if it does. The hot cement may be shoring up the spine or merely destroying the nerve endings that transmit pain. Or the procedure may simply have a placebo effect.

And some research hints that the procedure may be harmful in the long run, because when one vertebra is shored up, adjacent ones may be more likely to break.

But vertebroplasty and a similar procedure, kyphoplasty, are fast becoming the treatments of choice for patients with bones so weak their vertebrae break.

The two procedures are so common, said Dr. Ethel Siris, an osteoporosis researcher at Columbia University, that "if you have osteoporosis and come into an emergency room with back pain from a fractured vertebra, you are unlikely to leave without it." She said she was concerned about the procedures' widespread and largely uncritical acceptance.