ABSTRACT
The management of acute traumatic spinal cord lesions is a well established area of disability medicine (Young & Sarkarati, 1992). As experience in management of these injuries increased it became possible to predict the likely functional outcome of a patient with an acute complete spinal cord lesion by accurately assessing the level of the cord damage (Ozer, 1988). Although the basic care of spinal injury is equally applicable to patients with non-traumatic myelopathy, the outcome for this group is less certain. In part this arises from lack of detailed study, and in part because the conditions are very varied. Lesions can be acute (e.g. anterior spinal artery occlusion) or slowly progressive (e.g. spinal meningioma), can occur in the young (e.g. spina bifida) or the old (e.g. cervical myelopathy), can be partial or more rarely complete, and can occur in any site from the low thoracic cord to the high cervical cord. These different conditions, not surprisingly, have different potential for functional improvement.
