Patients ranked the presence of symptoms such as coughing, choking when eating, gagging, drooling, and problems chewing from never present to almost always present. This survey helps determine the type of symptoms, frequency of symptoms, and effect of dysphagia on the patient's life. Although the dysphagia usually goes away in the first three weeks after ACDF, there are cases of chronic (permanent) dysphagia.Ī special questionnaire called the Swallowing-Quality of Life Questionnaire (SWAL-QOL) was used to measure dysphagia. As many as 60 per cent of all patients having the anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) procedure report this as an annoying and sometimes disabling symptom. Post-operative dysphagia seems to be a fairly common problem. They used lumbar spine patients as the comparison group to see if the swallowing difficulty is a leftover effect of intubation (breathing tube placed down the throat during anesthesia). For some patients it was just a matter of removing the damaged disc while others had a disc removal and fusion. The lumbar procedure was done from the back or posterior aspect of the spine.

The word anterior in the name tells us the surgeon made the incision and performed the procedure from the front of the spine. They compared a small number of patients who had an anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) with a similar-sized group of patients who had a lumbar spine (low back) fusion.ĪCDF refers to the surgical removal of a damaged disc from between two vertebrae with fusion of those two vertebrae to each other using bone grafts, titanium cages, or other similar fixation devices. These are the questions posed in this study by surgeons from the University of Pittsburgh. But how come some patients develop this transient (temporary) symptom and others don't? And how often does it happen? This symptom of painful swallowing is called dysphagia. It makes sense that patients having anterior cervical spine surgery (from the front of the neck) might experience difficulty swallowing for a few weeks after the procedure.

Neck fusion problems years later