An incomplete paraplegia following the dislocation of an artificial cervical total disc replacement

Replacement of the cervical intervertebral disc by artificial implants, known as cervical total disc replacement (CTDR), is becoming a generally applied method instead of using the gold standard of the anterior cervical discectomy and fusion. Hypothetically, the preserved mobility results in the protection of the neighboring segments. There is growing evidence that results in patients who underwent CTDR were not inferior when compared to results in patients who underwent anterior cervical discectomy and fusion. The authors report a case of a healthy 53-year-old man who suffered an incomplete paraplegia below C-6 following the dislocation of an artificial CTDR device into the spinal canal with consequent compression of the spinal cord. (http://thejns.org/doi/abs/10.3171/2013.1.SPINE12691)