Spondylolisthesis clinical trials at UCSF

The LimiFlex™ Clinical Trial is a prospective, concurrently controlled, multi-center study to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of decompression and stabilization with the Empirical Spine LimiFlex™ Paraspinous Tension Band compared to decompression and transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF) with concomitant posterolateral fusion (PLF) for the treatment of lumbar degenerative spondylolisthesis (Grade I per Meyerding classification) with spinal stenosis. Clinical trial sites will enroll solely LimiFlex subjects or solely TLIF/PLF subjects.

The purpose of the project is to perform an RCT comparing patient satisfaction and outcome with or without the use of an expert panel. The purpose is also to create a registry to compare the effectiveness of decompression alone versus decompression with fusion for patients with degenerative grade I spondylolisthesis and symptomatic lumbar spinal stenosis. Primary analysis will focus on the patients' improvement from baseline patient-reported outcome questionnaires. In addition, the SLIP II registry aims to (i) develop an algorithm which could identify cases in which surgical experts are likely to recommend one treatment (i.e. >80% of experts recommend one form of treatment) and (ii) develop a radiology-based machine learning algorithm that would prospectively classify patients as either 'stable' or 'unstable.' In addition to patient reported outcomes, step counts will be collected in order to determine the correlation of step count with patient-reported outcomes (ODI and EQ-5D) and the need for re-operation. This registry portion of the study aims to prospectively collect comparative data for these patients treated with either decompression alone or decompression with fusion.