Publication details
Letter to the Editor concerning "Ribosomal PCR assay of excised intervertebral discs from patients undergoing single-level primary lumbar microdiscectomy.'' by Alamin TF, Munoz M, Zagel A, et al.: Eur Spine J 2017
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | European Spine Journal |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00586-017-5379-x |
| Keywords | Diskectomy; Humans; Intervertebral Disc; Lumbar Vertebrae; Polymerase Chain Reaction |
| Description | Based on epidemiological evidence (Urquhart et al. 2017), direct microscopic evidence of Propionibacterium acnes (P. acnes) biofilm in degenerated disc tissue (Capoor et al. 2017), and experimental induction of degenerative disc disease in an animal model using P. acnes (Shan et al. 2017), among other evidence, P. acnes infection is emerging as an etiological factor in degenerative disc disease. Therefore, a recent article published by Alamin et al. in European Spine Journal has raised some concern (Alamin et al. 2017). Alamin et al. failed to find evidence of any bacterial DNA in disc tissue obtained from 44 patients with radiculopathy and MRI findings of lumbar herniated nucleus pulposus who underwent lumbar microdiscectomy. They employed a PCR/amplicon sequencing assay used for the routine diagnosis of invasive infections and declared this method to detect 97.7% of infected tissues and fluid samples, using culture as the reference method (unpublished data). |