For the third time in a row, the spine research team of Ganga Hospital, Coimbatore, has won the North American Spine Society’s (NASS) outstanding paper award in basic science.
By bagging the award for 2021 for the paper ‘ Why do Modic Changes Result in Poor Clinical Outcomes? – Novel Insights from Proteomic analysis of Lumbar discs with Modic changes’, Ganga Hospital became the first institution to have won the honour consecutively for three years.
“This is a very coveted award which is jointly awarded by NASS and The Spine Journal (TSJ) which is the official research publication journal of the society. All the spine research organisations around the world fiercely compete for these awards,” said S. Rajasekaran, chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic and Spine Surgery at Ganga Hospital who heads the team.
The winning paper is published as a lead article in TSJ, one of the highest impact factor for spine speciality international journals, and it has also been invited to be presented in the annual meeting of the NASS in the U.S. The award also carries a cash prize of USD 10,000.
“Many patients who have low back pain do poorly with both medical and surgical treatment while others have excellent results with the same therapy and surgery. We addressed this question specifically and analysed the biological basis of this poor outcome,” said a statement issued by Dr. Rajasekaran.
According to Dr. Rajasekaran, low back pain significantly reduces the quality of life of nearly 70% of the patients worldwide causing a considerable economic and social impact. Degenerative disc disease is the commonest cause of low back pain.
Spine surgeons Dilipchand Raja, Vijay Anand, Ajoy Prasad Shetty, Rishi Mugesh Kanna, radiologist Pushpa, basic science specialists Raveendran Muthurajan, Chitra Tangavel, Sharon Nayagam, Sunmathi and Steffi are other members of the multidisciplinary team.
