Content analysis of information on clinical and radiological diagnostics of injuries and degenerative diseases of the cervical spine

The purpose of the review was to analyze scientific information on clinical and radiological diagnostics of degenerative diseases and injuries of the cervical spine. We used traditional qualitative method and content analysis for the study of 316 sources of scientific information, of which 77.5% were published during the last 5 years. We selected 2 groups for the content analysis: 1) common clinical signs in the syndromic circuit of diseases and injuries of the spine, 2) radiological diagnostics of spinal pathology. We defined meaningful units of the analysis. The literature data focused on different aspects of modern methods of radiological diagnostics of diseases and injuries of the spine (101 [32.0%] from Russian papers and 111 [35.1%] from foreign sources), and their clinical manifestations (63 [19.9%] and 41 [13.0%] sources respectively). Most publications comprehensively assessed patients (72 [34.0%] of the sources), considerable attention was paid to CT and MR tomography, ultrasonic examination (39 (18.4%), 38 (17.9%) and 43 (20.3%) respectively) and the lowest number of publications described the results of X-ray diagnostics (20 [9.4%] of sources). The content analysis allowed to evaluate quantitatively the available scientific information and to define the most promising directions in diagnostics.