ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Surg.
Sec. Orthopedic Surgery
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsurg.2025.1643744
This article is part of the Research TopicClinical and Basic Research on Chronic Spinal Cord Injury Associated with Spinal DegenerationView all 12 articles
A comparative study of the efficacy of whether or not to preserve the joint capsule during PLIF surgery in patients with Isthmic Spondylolisthesis
Provisionally accepted
- First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of joint capsule preservation during posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) on postoperative low back pain and long-term adjacent segment stability in isthmic spondylolisthesis (IS) patients.Group A: Forty-one patients received PLIF without preserving the joint capsule. Group B: Forty patients received PLIF with preserving the joint capsule. This study was randomly assigned, in which eligible patients were assigned to either group A (with joint capsule preservation) or group B (without joint capsule preservation). The radiographic outcomes were assessed via the lumbar lordosis (LL), segmental lordosis (SL), sacral slope (SS), pelvic incidence (PI), pelvic tilt (PT). The functional outcomes were evaluated via the Visual Analog Scale (VAS), Oswestry disability index (ODI), and reoperation rate. Metrics that describe the rate of degradation of adjacent segments include: the height of vertebral interval and the height of the upper intervertebral disc.The sagittal balance parameters of the spine in the two groups were significantly improved after PLIF compared with those before surgery (p <0.05). Compared with group A, the results of PI and PT in group B were significantly better than those in group A during the last follow-up (p <0.05). Although the height of the upper intervertebral disc and vertebral interval did not show statistically significant results after surgery (p >0.05), the height showed statistical differences during the last followup (p <0.05).For patients with IS, we recommend that appropriate patients with IS should preserve the joint capsule as much as possible during PLIF, which is very helpful in preventing long-term degeneration of adjacent segments.
Keywords: Posterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion (PLIF), isthmic spondylolisthesis (IS), Joint Capsule, Spinal balance, Adjacent segment degeneration (ASD)
Received: 09 Jun 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mi, Xu, Yang, Fang, Ni, Yang, Zhou and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Quan Zhou, First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China
Feng Zhou, First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.