Mercy Surgeons Perform Advanced Spine Procedure

Scripps Mercy Hospital neurosurgeons Sohaib Kureshi, MD, and Geoffrey Zubay, MD, were the first in San Diego to perform the state-of-the-art X-Stop® procedure, recently approved for the treatment of patients with lumbar spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spine resulting in painful pressure on the spinal nerves.

The spine surgery is for patients 55 and older who have no painful symptoms of spinal stenosis while sitting, but experience pain while standing or walking.

X-Stop, a titanium spacer inserted between the spinous process, enables patients to remain pain-free by keeping one or two levels of the spine in the sitting or flexed position — even when the patient stands up. The procedure takes less than one hour under minimal anesthesia, and patients may go home the next day.

“This minimally invasive procedure offers incredibly fast results with very little trauma,” said Sohaib Kureshi, MD, chief of neurosurgery at Scripps Mercy Hospital. “Rarely do we have the opportunity to offer patients such outstanding outcomes with such a low risk of complications.”

X-stop was first approved for use in Europe and Japan in 2001 and has been successfully implanted in more than 4,000 patients to date.

Four out of five adults will experience some kind of back pain in their lifetime. For many, spinal stenosis is an everyday painful reality. The condition, characterized by back and leg pain, numbness or weakness, is the most common cause of back surgery for adults over 50, affecting an estimated 400,000 Americans.