Anterior Cervical Screw Extrusion Leading to Acute Upper Airway Obstruction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Brief Study Design. Case report of late postoperative complication. Summary of Background Data. There have been a number of reports of migration and extrusion of cervical fusion instrumentation. The majority of such cases have a benign outcome. To our knowledge, cervical instrumentation extrusion resulting in prevertebral abscess and acute airway obstruction has not been reported. Methods. A 56-year-old man who had undergone a prior C3–C6 anterior cervical decompression and fusion presented to a hospital with dysphagia and acute airway obstruction requiring an emergency tracheostomy. His neck radiograph showed that a C6 screw was missing compared to prior films. Magnetic resonance imaging showed a large prevertebral abscess anterior to C2–C7 causing complete upper airway obstruction. Results. He underwent surgical drainage of the abscess and had a good neurologic recovery. Conclusions. We report a case of acute upper airway obstruction from prevertebral abscess, likely secondary to a loosened anterior cervical screw penetrating the prevertebral soft tissue. In contrast to case reports in the literature involving instrumentation extrusion with a usually benign outcome, our case presented with a life-threatening condition. A 56-year-old man presented with 4-year post-anterior cervical decompression and fusion with a large prevertebral abscess and acute upper airway obstruction requiring emergency tracheostomy. Previous reports of cervical instrumentation extrusion showed a usually benign outcome. To our knowledge this is the first case report describing a delayed prevertebral abscess leading to life threatening airway complication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".