Rheumatoid Arthritis and Cervical Spine - Health Channel

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Rheumatoid Arthritis and Cervical Spine |

Dr. Jose Mena, Interventional Spine Specialist with Miami Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Institute, says the joint between C1 and C2 can get displaced when people have rheumatoid arthritis, and the main concern is the spinal cord running behind it, so it can compress as well.

This disease could be dangerous, because all the nerves from C2 down can potentially be shut down, leaving the patient paralyzed.

Transcript

We have a prop here doctor can you show us what that is and what what that means so basically what we call the C’s the C stands for cervical okay so we have seven cervical Byrd whereas we have twelve thoracic five lumbar and then they will have the sacrum and coccyx so basically we start counting from the from the base of the spine which is in here that’s we call the occiput so basically the first bone that comes out from is basically the c1 so after the c1 then we have the c2 the cervical to sever equal three and so forth so basically we talk about c1 c2 and sometimes you might be hearing that on on the reports on imaging you might be hearing in c1 c2 c5 c6 so what we’re describing is the space the the landmark between the first and second vertebrae second and third fourth and fifth etc so basically between the c1 and c2 we’re talking about this level here so normally there’s a joint which is this one here and that joint actually can can get can get displaced can when people have rheumatoid arthritis and what our main concern is that we have the spinal cord that is running behind it so it can compress as you can see there’s a bone that slips forward reduce the space and compress the spinal cord at the c1 c2 level so basically all the nerve from c2 down they can potentially get shut down so you can be completely paralyzed from there and that obviously can be very dairenji so I was gonna ask you to narrow absolutely and we have artery there as well which called Berto artery that is actually running when when I do the c1 c2 injections for people that they do have pain we have to be very careful that we have this red structure that is running there and that’s actually gonna supply is coming from the heart and gonna supply the brain and people can develop a stroke you

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