Are Magnetic Resonance Imaging Technologies Crucial to Our Understanding of Spinal Conditions?

Abstract

Low back and neck pain are disabling conditions, 124 projected to dramatically increase personal and public socioeconomic burden as the world ages. 12; 26; 50 International experts have urgently called for renewed explanations and strategies to mitigate the persistence of spinal pain. 12; 50 To that end, skeletal muscles, the spinal cord, and brain are receiving more attention as advancements in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies and analysis methods allow for improved visualization and quantification of their morphology. 37 Growing in parallel is radiomics, the field of study that aims to mine large amounts of quantitative features from medical images using data characterization algorithms. 51; 135 As such, large datasets characterizing both healthy and diseased soft tissues with the patient's pain experience may add to the biopsychosocial model in understanding spinal pain.

Does Overall Cervical Spine Pathology Relate to the Clinical Heterogeneity of Chronic Whiplash?

“…The diagnostic and prognostic value of traditional imaging in whiplash injury remains unclear at least in part due to the variability in the approaches used in assessment, analysis of imaging findings [17][18][19][20][21]31,34,[36][37][38][39][40][41]53,54], and a lack of recognition for current knowledge regarding the known risk factors for poor recovery following whiplash [7,14,15,33,55,56]. Furthermore, unlike other common clinical diagnostic tests with wellestablished values of normative ranges (e.g.…”

Age-related degeneration of the lumbar paravertebral muscles: Systematic review and three-level meta-regression

“…Whilst studies have examined degeneration of the appendicular muscles (Cawthon et al, 2015;Müller et al, 2014;von Haehling et al, 2010;Woo and Leung, 2016) there is a paucity of available research focusing on age-related changes in the trunk musculature. This has been acknowledged by other researchers (Crawford et al, 2016c;Kalichman et al, 2017) despite the importance of paravertebral muscles in the maintenance of spinal health and physical function being increasingly recognised (Crawford et al, 2019;Goubert et al, 2016;Hicks et al, 2005a;Kalichman et al, 2017). Although age is known to influence paravertebral muscle morphology and attempts have been made to characterise degeneration of the paravertebral muscles with the natural ageing process (Burian et al, 2018;Crawford et al, 2016a;Fortin et al, 2014;Kalichman et al, 2017;Lee et al, 2017;Meakin et al, 2013;Shahidi et al, 2017;Valentin et al, 2015) the phenomenon is not fully understood.…”

The Effects of Combined Motor Control and Isolated Extensor Strengthening versus General Exercise on Paraspinal Muscle Morphology, Composition, and Function in Patients with Chronic Low Back Pain: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Further research should continue to evaluate the effect of exercise on muscle quality, considering that increased intramuscular fatty infiltration in the lumbar muscles has been associated with the presence and severity of spinal pain and dysfunction [ 73 , 74 ], the development of recurrent/persistent pain [ 75 ], lower physical function [ 74 , 76 , 77 ], inflammatory dysregulation [ 78 ], decreased muscle function [ 79 , 80 ], and poorer surgical outcomes [ 81 , 82 ]. Improving paraspinal muscle quality by means of exercise therapy therefore has the potential to provide a necessary biomarker towards informing and measuring therapeutic success [ 71 , 83 ].…”