Tuberculosis of the cervical spine

Infectious and inflammatory diseases of the spine remain an urgent problem in orthopedics and represent a certain difficulty for diagnosis and treatment [1,3,5,6,13,16,25,30,33]. The cervical spine is a rare localization of osteoarticular tuberculosis: according to different authors, its share in the structure of tuberculous spondylitis ranges from 2.5 to 6% [4,7,8,19,24,27]. Currently, there is an increase in atypical forms of tuberculous spondylitis of the cervical region, which is manifested by the monovertebral nature of the lesion [2,16, etc.]. The reasons for this lie in the change in the reactivity of macro- and microorganisms, the features of the age structure of the sick, the widespread use of antibacterial drugs, etc. According to Ahmadi et al. [16], out of 11 patients with spinal tuberculosis observed by them, 5 had data on the basis of which it was more likely to assume a neoplasm than an infectious process, including radiologically detected monovertebral destruction of the cervical vertebrae.