August 2007 - Tucson, Arizona

Dr. Timothy K. Putty and Dr. Richard V. Chua became one of Tucson's first neurosurgeons to be trained on a new surgical procedure to be offered at Northwest Medical Center, cervical disc arthroplasty. Instead of performing the more common cervical spine fusion, Drs. Putty and Chua plan to offer to some patients the new procedure recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In the new procedure, surgeons remove the disc material and replace it with a motion sparing device, instead of a bone graft and titanium plate. Rather than fusing the spine, the disc replacement allows the spine to maintain its normal ranges of motion. In clinical trials, patients who received the disc replacement had less neck pain, fewer complications, fewer revision surgeries, and were back to work sooner than those patients who received the traditional fusion surgery most commonly performed.

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