Khalid Abbed, M.D.
Mission
The Neurosurgical Spine Program at Yale seeks to provide a comprehensive approach to all diseases of the spine and spinal cord. The emphasis of the program is on patient care, providing an innovative, state of the art approach to spine and spinal cord pathology. Laboratory investigation is meant to correlate with the clinical practice and is directed at neural tissue regeneration, as well as minimizing the effects of spinal cord injury.
Clinical Care
The Spine program's emphasis is the patient, and all practice, including research efforts are directed at patient spine disease. The goal of clinical care is to improve and where possible eradicate spine and spinal cord disease, while maintaining maximal neurological function. Some of the areas covered under the Spine Program are spinal cord and spinal column tumors, including metastases, degenerative spine and disc disease, rheumatoid arthritis, peripheral nerve entrapment syndromes and spine trauma. To help in the diagnostic evaluations the Yale Neurosurgical Spine Program has access to highly sophisticated and state of the art diagnostic procedures, as well as electrophysiological tools to help with the clinical diagnosis. The operating suites contain the latest in advanced electrophysiological monitoring equipment to optimize safe removal of spinal cord pathology. In addition, spinal instrumentation, at all levels of the spine, from the cranio-cervical junction to the sacrum, is, when appropriate, used to stabilize otherwise unstable spines. At present, a spinal frameless stereotaxic system is being developed in the operating room, with the aim of improving accuracy at localizing anatomic structures intra-operatively. Yale New Haven Hospital is a level one trauma center, fully equipped to handle complex spinal cord injury. A well established spinal cord protocol which includes a comprehensive approach to spinal cord injured patients has been developed at the medical center. A ten bed dedicated Neurological Intensive Care Unit has the experience to focus on the most difficult spine patient management. All this technology, experience, know-how and research is aimed at optimizing patient outcome, recovery and comfort.
Research
The Department of Neurosurgery has had a long term commitment to research on spinal cord and neural tissue regeneration. The thrust of the research efforts have centered on understanding the injury process to central nervous system (CNS) axons and investigating ways at successful regeneration of pathways within the CNS.
Education
The primary aim of the educational efforts of the Spine Program is to train neurosurgical, orthopedic and neurology residents in the diagnosis and treatment of spine and spinal cord pathology. In addition, this Program has, as its' mission to educate the Yale medical students in the anatomy and physiology of the spine and spinal cord and in the recognition, accurate diagnosis and treatment parameters involved in spine pathology. Furthermore, as the premier medical educational facility in Connecticut, the Spine Program will provide a forum for physicians with an interest in spine disease to discuss complex management and therapeutic issues on campus.
The Yale Spine Surgery Program can be reached at 203-735-2807
Neurosurgery Faculty/Program Menu
Department of Neurosurgery address and phone number
http://info.yale.med.edu/surgery/neurosur/neuroonco.html
credits
