The kyphosis–lordosis difference parameter and its utility in understanding the pathogenesis of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis

Adrian Gardner*, Fiona Berryman, Paul Pynsent

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Objective: The relationship of sagittal spinal shape in the pathogenesis of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is recognised. What is not clear is the relationship between the sagittal shape of those without scoliosis and the potential development of AIS, including the greater prevalence in females. The use of a new parameter, the kyphosis–lordosis
(KL) difference, was developed to explore this further.

Results: The KL difference was calculated for 117 males and 79 females over seven years with 831 measures made. For females, the KL difference, between the ages of 9 and 12 ½ years, decreases from 5° to nearly 0° until starting to climb again from the age of 14 years, back to 5° by the age of 16 ½ years. For males, there is a gradual decline from 9°
at age 9 years to 5° at age 17 years. Both age and sex were statistically significant in the development of the parameter. When comparing to previously published data around the true, de-rotated, sagittal shape of the scoliotic spine, the KL difference has utility in explaining the female predominance in the prevalence of AIS. This adds to the weight
of evidence behind understanding why AIS develops.
Original languageEnglish
Article number178
Number of pages6
JournalBMC Research Notes
Volume15
Early online date15 May 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2022

Bibliographical note

Copyirght © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Data Access Statement

The data sets used and analysed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Keywords

  • Kyphosis
  • Lordosis
  • Scoliosis
  • AIS
  • Sagittal
  • Spine

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