ÍNDICE FUNCIONAL DE OSWESTRY APÓS CIRURGIA PARA DESCOMPRESSÃO DE RAÍZES NERVOSAS Oswestry Disability Index after Surgery for Decompression of Nerve Roots

Low back pain with irradiated symptoms and neurological signs is a condition extremely challenging to treat. At first, this kind of treatment is conservative when the patients must rest, take medicine and do physiotherapy sections. If this conservative treatment fails, it is unlikely the symptoms disappear by themselves, and then the surgical intervention will be considered. The aim of this study was to analyze the evolution of patients who were undergone a surgery due to disc herniation and foraminal stenosis correction in the low back segment. These patients were evaluated by the Oswestry disability index for low back, the analogical visual scale of pain, patellar and ankle reflexes and fleximeter used for mensuration of the of the spinal column mobility. The assessment were performed one, two, three, six and twelve months after the surgery and the Oswestry index values were 44%, 24%, 14%, 16% and 10% respectively. These results show that the patients evolution can not be considered good because it is slow and after a year they have still had disfunction and some residual pain. Although it is important to point out that surgical intervention is made to relieve the hard sciatical pain, but the mecanical disfunctions caused by the disc disease still goes on.