Clinical profile of paediatric spinal cord damage in a developing country’s rural-area tertiary hospital neurosurgery

Spinal cord damage (SCD) is rare in children, hence the paucity of literature on the subject, particularly in developing countries. This study aims to define the clinical epidemiology of paediatric SCD in a Nigerian tertiary health facility. A retrospective review of a 42-month long prospectively collected clinical data on paediatric SCD in a rural neurosurgery unit. There were 37 children (20 males) accounting for about 12% of the paediatric neurosurgical patients we managed during the study period. The mean age was 6.9 years (peak = 0–4 years, 43.2%). Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) was the cause of SCD in 54.1% (20/37) of the cases, spinal bifida in 37.8%, spinal cord tumour in 5.4%, and spinal tuberculosis in 2.7%. The mean age of patients with traumatic SCI was 11.5 years, while the median age for spinal bifida was 3 days. Traumatic SCI was caused by road traffic accident in 70% (14/20), and falls in 25%. The cervical spinal cord was the location of the spinal cord damage in 51.4% of all the cases in this study, lumbosacral in 24.3%, and sacral in 10.8%. Traumatic SCI was predominantly located in the cervical region in (90%, 18/20) while spinal bifida was most commonly lumbosacral (64.3%, 9/14). Spinal cord damage accounted for more than a tenth (12.1%) of our paediatric neurosurgical workload in this rural neurosurgery, and are mostly due to traumatic SCI and spinal bifida.