After debating the pros and cons for months about surgery for our son, we finally agreed to rods being placed in his spine for severe scoliosis. Six months later, the rod broke and we were worse off than before surgery. We knew there was a risk of this happening but why did it happen? That's what we want to know.
Without knowing the particulars of your son's case, we can't really say what happened. This is a question the surgeon may be able to answer. We can provide you with some information from a recently published study on risk factors for rod breakage in children with scoliosis. You might find something (or several somethings) in this list that match your son's situation. The study was done by a group of 10 pediatric orthopedic centers. They put together a growing rod database by combining all the information they had from 327 children treated with growing rods throughout all 10 centers. By putting information about each case into a computer database, they could study and analyze the data. In this study, they looked for risk factors for rod breakage. The hope was to find ways to prevent this complication. The first thing they noticed was the percentage of children who experienced growing rod fractures: 15 per cent. Then by comparing children with breakage against children without rod fractures, they isolated the risk factors. Here's what they found: