Trends, Major Medical Complications, and Charges Associated With Surgery for Lumbar Spinal Stenosis in Older Adults

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Abstract
In planning spine operations, surgeons have wide discretion. For pain-related surgery, consensus on indications for specific procedures (eg, decompression alone or decompression plus fusion) is generally lacking1-3 despite randomized trials for some condition and procedure combinations.4-10 Furthermore, individual surgeon preferences may outweigh patient and disease characteristics in choosing procedures.3 Such choices are important because greater invasiveness is associated with greater complications, health care use, and mortality4,11,12 but generally similar clinical benefit.7-10,12