What happens when C2 is fractured?
Symptoms of a minor C2 fracture can include problems moving the neck, pain, swelling, tenderness, trouble swallowing, loss of feeling or a tingling sensation in the arms and legs,numbness or pain at the base of the head, double vision, or loss of consciousness.
What happens if you break your spinous process?
Signs and symptoms depend on where the fracture happened and how severe it is: Sudden, sharp, stabbing pain that may be severe or worse when you move or breathe. Dull pain that continues for several days or weeks. Swollen, numb, bruised, or tingling skin over the fracture area.
How serious is a C2 neck fracture?
Injuries to the C1 and C2 vertebrae are rare, accounting for only 2% of spinal injuries each year. However, they are also considered to be the worst spinal cord injury that it is possible to sustain, and often fatal.
Can you walk around with a fractured spine?
A fractured vertebra has the potential to heal regardless of your age, the severity of the fracture, and whether you have other medical conditions. In order to give the bone time to heal, your doctor may recommend that you avoid all high impact activities, including sports and exercise.
What is the name of a fracture to the spinous process called?
Fractures of isolated spinous processes of cervical and thoracic vertebrae are called as Clay shoveler’s fracture. These are the avulsion type of injury due to stress on the interspinous ligaments attached to the spinous process.
Is a spinous process fracture stable?
Because of the inherent stability of spinous process fractures, these can be treated conservatively with rest, orthotic support, analgesics and physical therapy.
What causes a spinous process fracture?
Isolated spinous process fractures are generally caused by high shear forces generated by contracting the trapezius and rhomboid muscles on the lower cervical and upper thoracic spinous processes during thrusting of the neck and/or shoulders [1], [2].
What does spinous process do?
The spinous processes throughout the spine function as a series of levers both for muscles of posture and for muscles of active movement (Standring et al., 2008). Most of the muscles that attach to the spinous processes act to extend the vertebral column.