Study Design. Retrospective study of 55 consecutive patients with spinal metastases secondary to breast cancer who underwent surgery.Objective. To evaluate the predictive value of the Tokuhashi score for life expectancy in patients with breast cancer with spinal metastases.Summary of Background Data. The score, composed of 6 parameters each rated from 0 to 2, has been proposed by Tokuhashi and colleagues for the prognostic assessment of patients with spinal metastases.Methods. A total of 55 patients surgically treated for vertebral metastases secondary to breast cancer were studied. The score was calculated for each patient and, according to Tokuhashi, the patients were divided into 3 groups with different life expectancy according to their total number of scoring points. In a second step, the grouping for prognosis was modified to get a better correlation of the predicted and definitive survival.Results. Applying the Tokuhashi score for the estimation of life expectancy of patients with breast cancer with vertebral metastases provided very reliable results. However, the original analysis by Tokuhashi showed a limited correlation between predicted and real survival for each prognostic group. Therefore, our patients were divided into modified prognostic groups regarding their total number of scoring points, leading to a higher significance of the predicted prognosis in each group (P Ͻ 0.0001), and a better correlation of the predicted and real survival.Conclusion. The modified Tokuhashi score assists in decision making based on reliable estimators of life expectancy in patients with spinal metastases secondary to breast cancer.
For surgical decisions in renal cancer patients with spinal metastases, the prognostic score of Tokuhashi appears to be much more valuable than the Tomita score.
When compared the functional outcome, the dynamic stabilization seems to be a promising alternative to fusion in patients with degenerative lumbar instability with spinal stenosis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.