Asian Spine Journal

Yasuda, Togawa, Hasegawa, Yamato, Kobayashi, Arima, and Matsuyama: Response to: Hypoglossal Nerve Unjury after Cervical Spine Surgery

Letter to the Editor

Online first: July 28, 2015

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4184/asj.2015.9.4.660

Response to: Hypoglossal Nerve Unjury after Cervical Spine Surgery

Tatsuya Yasuda, Daisuke Togawa, Tomohiko Hasegawa, Yu Yamato, Sho Kobayashi, Hideyuki Arima, Yukihiro Matsuyama

Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Hamamatsu, Japan.

Corresponding author: Tatsuya Yasuda. Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Hamamatsu University of Medicine, 1-20-1 Handayama, Higashi-ku, Hamamatsu 431-3192, Japan.
Tel: +81-53-435-2299, Fax: +81-53-435-2296, t.yasuda@hama-med.ac.jp

Received May 21, 2015 Accepted May 22, 2015

(open-access, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/):

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We are extremely grateful for your interest in our manuscript. The report by Saunders et al. was very helpful. As you indicated, there are reports about hypoglossal nerve palsy (HNP) after soft tissue surgery of the neck. Although there are only three reports [1,2,3] of HNP after cervical spine surgery, more cases might exist. Therefore, we must pay attention to tongue movement after anterior cervical spine surgery.

We think that HNP after anterior cervical spine surgery is caused by excessive intraoperative retraction. In our case, only osteophyte resection was performed. Therefore, the duration of operation time was markedly shorter than the other two cases [2,3]. The duration of pressure time is related to the extent of nerve damage. If the surgical time was longer, permanent HNP could have occurred in our case as with other two cases. We think that intermittent release of retraction is important to avoid hypoglossal nerve damage.

We greatly appreciate for the opportunity to discuss the issues raised, and thank you for your interest in our study.

Conflict of Interest

Conflict of Interest: Conflict of Interest: No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

REFERENCES

REFERENCES: 1. Yasuda T, Togawa D, Hasegawa T, et al. Hypoglossal nerve palsy as a complication of an anterior approach for cervical spine surgery. Asian Spine J 2015;9:295–298. PMID: 25901245.
[Article] [PubMed] [PMC]

2. Sengupta DK, Grevitt MP, Mehdian SM. Hypoglossal nerve injury as a complication of anterior surgery to the upper cervical spine. Eur Spine J 1999;8:78–80. PMID: 10190859.
[Article] [PubMed] [PMC]

3. Saunders RL, Bernini PM, Shirreffs TG Jr, Reeves AG. Central corpectomy for cervical spondylotic myelopathy: a consecutive series with long-term follow-up evaluation. J Neurosurg 1991;74:163–170. PMID: 1988583.
[Article] [PubMed]