There are also important nerves like the vagus nerve and structures like the esophagus and the trachea which you breathe through. Things like the carotid artery and huge veins run in the neck. There are whole lot of structures there that are incredibly important for life. However, opening the front of the neck is not a benign procedure. The procedure itself is technically easier to do than a lumbar spine fusion. The difference in the neck and the lumbar spine is that the front of the neck is much easier to get to than in the spine. The spacer is usually a cage which will contain the bony fragments. They’ll put a spacer in to widen and create the correct distance between the vertebrae so that the nerves can come up more easily. The fusion operation itself involves destroying the disc and replacing it with bone fragments that are usually harvested from the patient’s own iliac crest (a large bone in the pelvis.)ĭuring the operation, the surgeon will take this bone and crumble it into the space that is left behind by the disc. However, the disc in the neck, even though it starts to look worn or damaged, is less likely to be a cause of chronic neck pain, because it carries less load. This makes lumbar spine discs more likely to be the primary cause of back pain.

In the back, the disc carries about 85% of the weight and the facet joint only 15% of the way. This is different from the lumbar (back) spine, where the disc is proportionately much bigger.Ĭervical Spine – blue objects are the discs The facet joints are relatively big and they carry the rest of the load. In the neck, the disk itself carries about 50% of the weight of the head. The reason fusions are done is that the surgeon has made a clinical decision that a disc in the neck is the primary cause of the person’s neck pain. You can do a three-level fusion or even a four-level fusion. If you do a two-level fusion, there’ll be two discs that are destroyed by the surgeon. The procedure of fusion is that the surgeon goes in and destroys the disc which sits between two vertebrae. What a Spinal Fusion Is…Ī cervical spine fusion is an operation that’s been around for probably 30 years. The key to unraveling this lies in understanding the effects of the fusion, and what can go wrong with the operation. There are many reasons why someone may have chronic neck pain after cervical fusion.

Neck fusion problems years later