ABSTRACT
Low back pain is common. Five percent of the population is affected per year, with a lifetime incidence between 60" and 90" of the population. Low back pain with or without radiculopathy remains one of the more difficult medical conditions to treat and has a high degree of impairment, activity limitation, and treatment cost. One common purported cause of low back and leg pain is spinal degeneration. Disc degeneration, thickening and buckling of the ligamentum flavum, and facet hypertrophy contribute to spinal canal narrowing, which is generally greatest at the disc level. Patients with persistent mechanical back and radicular pain caused by degenerative disc disease, spondylolisthesis, lumbar spinal stenosis or spondylosis, recurrent disc herniation, lumbar deformity, or pseudoarthrosis may benefit from lumbar fusion. Fusion or arthrodesis is the process where a spinal level is made rigid by bone growth across the typically mobile segment. Historically, the most common method to obtain lumbar fusion has been the posterior or posterolateral fusion.
