Comparison of Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion to Posterior Cervical Foraminotomy for Cervical Radiculopathy: Utilization, Costs, and Adverse Events 2003 to 2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Surgery for cervical radiculopathy is often approached by either anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) or posterior cervical foraminotomy (PCF). ACDF is more common; however, recent single center studies suggest comparable efficacy and significant cost savings with PCF in appropriately selected patients. OBJECTIVE: To compare utilization, adverse events, and costs for each approach from a national perspective. METHODS: Adults undergoing single level ACDF or PCF for cervical radiculopathy were included from a US commercial health insurance claims database spanning 2003 to 2014. Outcomes consisted of mortality, adverse events, length of stay, and total payments to the health provider. Propensity score matching balanced the groups on observed baseline covariates. RESULTS: The PCF cohort comprised 4851 subjects and the ACDF cohort included 46 147. A greater proportion of PCF cases were discharged on the same day (70.6% vs 46.1%; P < .001). Mortality (0.1/1000, P = .012), vascular injury (0.2/1000, P = .001), postoperative dysphagia/dysphonia (14.5/1000, P < .001), cutaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak (0.2/1000, P = .002), and deep venous thrombosis (0.9/1000, P = .013) occurred more frequency in the ACDF cohort. Conversely, wound infections (14.6/1000, P < .001) and 30-d readmissions (9.8/1000, P < .001) were more frequent in the PCF cohort. Mean unadjusted total payments for the PCF cohort were $15 281 ± 12 225 and $26 849 ± 16 309 for ACDF. Matched difference was -$11 726 [95% confidence interval: -$12 221, -$11 232, P < .001] favoring PCF. CONCLUSION: Within the inherent limitations of administrative data, our findings suggest an opportunity for value improvement in managing cervical radiculopathy and indicate a need for large-scale comparative study of clinical outcomes and costs.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".