Scoliosis specialists at Mayo Clinic Children's Center collaborate with you to provide advanced, comprehensive scoliosis treatment. Options include physical therapy, bracing options, Mehta casting, growing rods, and both fusion and motion-sparing surgical interventions such as vertebral body tethering. Also called VBT, tethering is a minimally invasive procedure that corrects spinal deformity while preserving spinal flexibility, offering a motion-sparing alternative to traditional fusion surgery.
I think it's important to talk to people who understand scoliosis and who have all of the different options in front of them. Families are seeking answers. We're lucky in that a lot of the scoliosis fit into the non-operative, non-interventional scoliosis. These are curves that are small and curves in kids who aren't doing any more growing. The interventional side, scoliosis tends to worsen when the kids are going through their major growth spurt. For scoliosis, it's relatively straightforward on the diagnosis side. Mayo Clinic helps us care for these patients. It puts all of the experts that we have in one room. It's really the workup and the surgical options that come after it. They'll walk out and they'll know what their options are for scoliosis. For severe scoliosis, we're recommending treatment, young children are too small for a fusion surgery, so we have a variety of growing spine devices that bridge diffusion. One of the promising procedures right now that has an FDA approval is vertebral body tethering, and instead of one long incision in the back, there are multiple small incisions in the side. And instead of 20 screws and 2 rods, we're placing one screw in each vertebra connected by a flexible cord. And this basically pulls the spine into a straighter position. And then as the child continues to grow, the spine may even straighten a little bit more. And because it's a plastic cord, instead of rigid metal rods, the spine can still move and the child can still grow. I think vertebral body tethering is the largest leap that we've had in scoliosis care in 30 years. After vertebral body tethering, their quality of life has significantly improved and is much accelerated compared to previous traditional ways of treating scoliosis. Technology that we have access to here at Mayo Clinic, we use a computer. Navigation system, it allows us to see three dimensional pictures of the spine so that when we're placing those screws we know exactly where they're going. It is the key part about why Mayo Clinic allows us to innovate. It gives us these other tools so that we can innovate in a safe space. We want to come together to have the best outcome for the families. Discussion with our primary care providers that are referring patients to us, they can trust that we will do the right thing and be able to give them the best care that we can. My ultimate goal would be for children to be able to be children and not have to worry about their scoliosis. I just don't want it to be their identity.
