الفهرس 
Anatomy of thoracolumbar junctionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Thoracolumbar fractures are the most common type of spinal fractures, causing many social, economic, and medical problems. In spite of being very commonly faced by spinal surgeons, thoracolumbar fractures still pose a medical and surgical dilemma. We explored the feasibility, safety, efficacy, and cosmosis of thoracoscopic reconstruction for thoracolumbar junction fractures, and compared these aspects to those of the new mini-open modifications of conventional anterior approaches. We divided our study group into two groups and the highly selected patients candidate for surgical anterior reconstruction were blindly distributed between these two groups (to avoid selection bias). We used various methods of reconstruction. In the conventional group it included cages (expandable and nonexpendable), and tricortical iliac bone grafts (with and without bicortical screws), while in thoracoscopy group, it included mostly tricortical iliac bone except 3 cases with intersomatic cages. Both procedures were found more or less equivalent in terms of neurological recovery, functional outcome, fusion rate, and maintenance of correction gain. However, thoracoscopy was found to be of better cosmosis with statistical significance. We finally, recommended that thoracoscopy should be the procedure of choice when dealing with thoracolumbar fractures via combined approaches, that need posterior stabilization combined with anterior reconstruction.