EuroSpine Award for Ganga Hospital
City-based Ganga Hospital’s research on ‘Pharmacological Enhancement of Disc Diffusion and Differentiation of Healthy, Ageing and Degenerated Discs’ has bagged the EuroSpine Award, instituted by the Spine Society of Europe.A communication from the society to the hospital has said that the award (10,000 euros) would be handed over at Geneva in Switzerland on May 27.The hospital said the award was instituted to encourage research in spinal disorders. A committee comprising experts in spine surgery scrutinises the studies done by research institutions all over the world. The award was for the best, original research performed and completed in the last four years.
A five-member team led by Head of the Department of Orthopaedics and Spine Surgery S. Rajasekaran did the research. The other members were Ajoy Prasad Shetty, Naresh Babu, Venkatadass and Ganesh. Ganga Hospital’s paper was among 42 entries from leading spine units across the world.Explaining the area of research, Dr. Rajasekaran said in a release that low back pain was the most common musculoskeltal disorder all over the world. The economic loss from lost man days ran into several billions of dollars.The degeneration of the lumbar disc was the most common cause for back pain and the World Health Organisation had urged scientists to concentrate on methods to establish the cause for disc degeneration. It also wanted them to find ways to prevent the problem.
The main reason for early degeneration was the disc did not have direct blood supply and entirely depended upon a process of diffusion for their nutrition. There were, however, many factors that affected nutrition and there had been a major problem in accurately measuring the diffusion in humans in live conditions.Most of the research on this subject had been on cadavers or animals. Therefore, it was impossible to extrapolate these findings to humans.The team at the hospital evolved the award-winning method in 2004 to measure the diffusion and document the pattern over 24 hours.
