Treating scoliosis in kids with magnets
August 17, 2010 | Length: 00:03:05
Stopping curvature of the spine in kids usually requires a series of painful operations to implant rods and screws to adjust the spine. Even then, the results are often less than perfect. However, a medical team at UCSF has developed a technique using magnets that promises to do away with so many surgeries.
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>>Mike Harrison: He's going to spin this magnet, going to spin that magnet. I'm Mike Harrison. I work at UCSF. I'm interested in correcting deformities in children using magnetic force. Scoliosis is one of the deformities that is a huge problem and particularly the kind that affects children early in their life. Scoliosis is curvature of the spine. It's very destructive, I mean, truly dangerous in that it deforms things like your chest wall, your ability to breathe, your lung function, your heart function so it's a very serious problem. What really hurts and is really dangerous is the correction which requires major surgery often lasting hours and hours and hours and implantation of big metal rods and then re-operations to adjust the rods. If we could make a rod that moved a little tiny bit, let's say a millimeter everyday, it would be fabulous but how would you make a rod move a little tiny bit? That's where we went to the magnet concept. The robo phonetic implant is simply replacing that static rod which doesn't move with a really cool rod which you can move from outside the patient without a re-operation. The principle is that you use magnetic coupling, us a spinning magnet on the outside which you control to spin the magnet inside the rod that elongates it is very exciting because what it's going to do is allow you to come up to the outside of the patient without any operation, anesthesia, anything else and the doctor can actually prescribe; well, here's what we'll do we'll move it a millimeter everyday. You can program the outside controller to turn this a very precise amount. For the kids who have the most severe form of scoliosis their lives are sort of devastated so if you could change that to something in which they simply take your device and put it near there back and go bizz, you know, for 60 seconds everyday, I mean, that would be a game changer. We're on a trajectory to probably have it in kids maybe within a year.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====