Medical Student Research Forum Posters

Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion (ACDF) is used to treat a variety of cervical pathologies including degenerative disease, myelopathy, radiculopathy, and traumatic injuries. It has become one of the most common cervical spine procedures in the United States. In ACDF, the “gold standard” for grafts has been the autograft harvested from the patient’s iliac crest. However, autografts tend to cause an increase donor site morbidities, such as, pain, infection, hematoma, fracture, and wound healing. Due to the donor site morbidities, surgeons have opted to use allografts as alternatives. Fresh-frozen and freeze-dried allografts are common alternatives to autografts. Fresh-frozen allografts and freeze-dried allografts go through different forms of processing to help decrease immune response in the patient, as well as, preserve structural integrity through storage. We hypothesize that fresh-frozen allografts will have a higher rate of fusion due to its preserved structural integrity through it’s less rigorous processing method.