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Maayken Elizabeth Louise van den Berg [1] and Juan M. Castellote [2; 3] and Jose Ignacio Mayordomo [4] and Ignacio Mahillo-Fernandez [5] and Jesus de Pedro-Cuesta [6]
Academic Editor: Giovanni Grasso
1, Department of Rehabilitation, Aged and Extended Care, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia, flinders.edu.au
2, National School of Occupational Medicine, Carlos III Institute of Health, Madrid, Spain, isciii.es
3, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, School of Medicine, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, ucm.es
4, Division of Medical Oncology, University of Colorado Hospital, Aurora, CO, USA, uchealth.org
5, University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Díaz, Av. Reyes Católicos 2, Madrid, Spain
6, Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red sobre Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas (CIBERNED), Madrid, Spain, ciberned.es
Received Mar 30, 2017; Accepted Jun 21, 2017
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Nontraumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) accounts for a significant proportion of all SCI unit and rehabilitation admissions [1, 2], and allocation resources should take into account incidence and trends over time. Although cases of traumatic origin account for the largest proportion of SCI, and most SCI studies have been conducted in this group, nontraumatic SCI recently has received more attention [3–7]. The diverse underlying pathologies of nontraumatic SCI translate into differences in case ascertainment time, clinical outcomes, case management, and functional expectations [3, 6, 8–10]. The principal causes of nontraumatic SCI are primary or metastatic tumours. Tumour, intradural or extradural lesions, can cause a wide spectrum of SCI symptoms by either spinal cord compression or invasion and destruction of the spinal cord or its vasculature. Advances in diagnosis and treatment lead to earlier and higher detection of cancer and central nervous system involvement as well as to increased survival rates [8]. Subsequently, neurooncology units will increasingly be confronted with frequent admissions of patients presenting SCI due to tumour or metastasis.
Although demographic observational reports on SCI due to tumour or metastasis have been published, there is a lack of studies on incidence and trends over time. They are needed to manage allocation and delivery of health resources in population-based neurooncology settings. In order to address this goal, description of...