Copyright
©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Orthop. Oct 18, 2015; 6(9): 680-687
Published online Oct 18, 2015. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v6.i9.680
Published online Oct 18, 2015. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v6.i9.680
Vertebral fracture assessment: Current research status and application in patients with kyphoplasty
Efstathios Drampalos, Christos Baltas, Alexia Balanika, Antonis Galanos, Nikolaos Papaioannou, Laboratory for the Research of the Musculoskeletal System (LRMS), Faculty of Medicine, University of Athens, 14561 Athens, Greece
Efstathios Drampalos, Center for Hip Surgery, Wrightington Hospital, Wigan WN6 9EP, United Kingdom
Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, Spyros Pneumaticos, C’ Orthopedic Department, University of Athens, “K.A.T” Hospital, Kifisia, 14561 Athens, Greece
Author contributions: All authors contributed to this manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Drampalos E, Nikolopoulos K, Baltas C, Balanika A, Galanos A, Papaioannou N and Pneumaticos S, hereby declare that, as authors of the manuscript, we have no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Efstathios Drampalos, Associate Research Fellow at Laboratory for the Research of the Musculoskeletal System (LRMS), Faculty of Medicine, University of Athens, 2nd Nikis St, Kifisia, 14561 Athens, Greece. edrampalos@yahoo.gr
Telephone: +30-210-8018123
Received: May 29, 2015
Peer-review started: June 1, 2015
First decision: June 24, 2015
Revised: July 5, 2015
Accepted: August 10, 2015
Article in press: August 11, 2015
Published online: October 18, 2015
Processing time: 144 Days and 10.8 Hours
Peer-review started: June 1, 2015
First decision: June 24, 2015
Revised: July 5, 2015
Accepted: August 10, 2015
Article in press: August 11, 2015
Published online: October 18, 2015
Processing time: 144 Days and 10.8 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: Vertebral fracture assessment (VFA) is an efficient, low radiation method of identifying vertebral fractures at the time of bone mineral density measurement. Models used to indicate the need for VFA may have little predictive power in subgroups of the general population such as patients with kyphoplasty. In our hands, VFA applied in patients with kyphoplasty was highly reproducible, demonstrating very good agreement in terms of intraobserver and interobserver reliability. More research will help the adoption of care processes to determine when and how often VFA should be performed, considering also the impact of such cost on healthcare organizations.