 Cervical laminoplasty is an innovative way of treating cervical myelopathy and cervical stenosis. I'm Eugene Coe, an associate professor of orthopedics and neurosurgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Today we're drawing outside the lines. Cervical stenosis and cervical myelopathy is a common condition that happens usually around the 30s and 40s and really peaks at its symptomatic level at age 50. Impetients can often present with pain in the neck, and the neck pain can actually radiate down to their arms. They can actually have problems with ballots, feel like that they're walking funny, and they can drop objects and have coordination problems. The traditional method of treating cervical stenosis and cervical myelopathy is to often do a decompression, get the pressure off the spinal cord, as well as a fusion. And when you do a fusion, you may lose up to 50% of motion of the neck. With a cervical laminoplasty, it's a different technique. In my cartoon figure of the spinal cord, the spinal cord is this circle here, and it's protected by a bone called the lamina and the spondus process. In a cervical laminoplasty, we're going through the back of the neck, making a dissection, and what we're doing is creating cuts, bony cuts, that allow us to now take this lamina and move it upwards and allow the spinal cord to float back about 10 millimeters, so it's no longer getting compressed by all the arthritic changes. We hold that lamina up with a metal plate to give it more room, so it's no longer getting compressed. The nice thing about this type of surgery is that it ends up the muscles attached back up to here and allows full range of motion of the neck, so you don't lose that 50% of motion of the neck when you do a typical fusion. So in summary, cervical laminoplasty is a very effective way of treating cervical stenosis and cervical myelopathy without losing range of motion of the neck. If you fuse, you lose about 50% of motion of the neck, and that can create problems for a lot of patients.