Chronic hypertrophic nonunion of the Type II odontoid fracture causing cervical myelopathy: Case report and review of literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Complications of nonunited Type II odontoid fractures can range from neck pain to progressive neurological deficit from cervical myelopathy. Rarely, the hypertrophic nonunion requires both anterior transoral decompression and posterior decompression with instrumented fusion. We present a case and review literature around this entity. CASE DESCRIPTION: A 68-year-old female presented with rapidly progressive cervical myelopathy (from normal to moderate myelopathy modified Japanese Orthopedic Association [mJOA] 13) over 3 months. Her history was positive for a Type II odontoid fracture managed conservatively and lost to follow-up for 25 years. Spinal imaging studies revealed hypertrophic nonunion and craniocervical kyphotic deformity with significant subaxial stenosis and segmental kyphosis. The patient underwent anterior transoral decompression, followed by posterior occipitothoracic decompression and instrumented fusion. At follow-up, the cervical myelopathy has improved to near normalcy (mJOA 17) with no evidence or implant-related complication. CONCLUSION: Rarely, nonunion of Type II odontoid fractures may be hypertrophic where both instability and compression cause neurological morbidity. Such cases require anterior transoral decompression, posterior cervical decompression, and instrumented fusions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".