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Mount Sinai Spine Center
5 East 98th Street, 4th floor
New York, NY 10029

Mount Sinai Doctors Manhasset
1155 Northern Boulevard,
3rd Floor, Suite 300
Manhasset, NY 11030

Dr. Baron Lonner - Ivanhoe Broadcast News

Courtesy of Ivanhoe Broadcast News

NEW YORK, N.Y. (Ivanhoe Newswire)— More than 100,000 children in the United States are diagnosed with scoliosis every year. Some need bracing to straighten the curvature of the spine. For more severe cases, doctors perform surgery to fuse the spine, which stops the progression and pain, but limits mobility. Now a new procedure may allow young athletes to continue to compete.

Fifteen-year-old Alivia McCord lives to dance, but this nationally ranked competitor almost had to give it all up.

“I was in my dance costume, and my mom noticed that I was crooked. My hips were crooked,” Alivia McCord told Ivanhoe.

Doctors diagnosed Alivia with scoliosis and recommended immediate surgery to fuse her back, which would have limited her bending or twisting. Instead, the McCord’s decided to try a non-invasive back brace, but…

“When we did the out of brace x-ray, they took her out of her brace for like four days, her curve went right back,” Donna McCord, Alivia’s mom, shared.

That’s when the McCord’s sought out scoliosis specialist, Dr. Barron Lonner. Dr. Lonner recommended a new procedure called vertebral body tethering or VBT.

“So, the benefit of tethering is we don’t permanently alter the spine and we maintain flexibility and some growth for the patients,” said Dr. Lonner, the chief of minimally invasive scoliosis surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Instead of opening the back, surgeons access a patient’s spine through tiny holes in their side.

Dr. Lonner elaborated, “What we do is place screws into the vertebral bodies, which are the building blocks of the spine.”

Then surgeons maneuver a flexible cord into the back, and anchor it to the screws. The tethering corrects the curvature, but still allows patients almost full movement. Six weeks after surgery, Alivia was back to training and performing.

“I was so happy that I was just back on my dance floor, and I could just dance again,” Alivia McCord announced.

Surgeons have been performing VBT in clinical trials for about ten years, but the procedure was approved by the FDA in 2019. The most common patient for this procedure is someone who is age ten or older and is still growing. Doctors say that growth allows them to get more correction over time. However, some doctors also consider patients, like Alivia, who wouldn’t do well with a traditional fusion.