A Car Accident Injury can Aggravate or Activate the Preexisting Condition of Osteoarthritis in your Spine

Hi, I’m Tim Williams with Dwyer Williams Potter Attorneys.  I’m the lead litigation attorney here at the firm and also a partner.  I’d like to talk today about osteoarthritis, also called degenerative joint disease.

Here we see a very healthy level of the back.  We see the two vertebral bodies and also the healthy disk in between.  There are lots of cushion and lots of space between the two levels of bone because this disk is nice and healthy, and also the bones have no lipping or spurring or anything; they’re nice and smooth.

Here you see a portion of the back that is later on in life.  We see a little bit of squishing or loss of disk space height here between the two levels of bone.  We see that the disk has actually changed color, and that is to signify that it is drying out and becoming less bendable, less malleable, more rigid, and we see just a little bit of lipping starting, like over here.  The bone is actually extending out in a way and extending out to where it wasn’t early on in life.

Here we see a level of the back that is much later in life.  It’s different for each person, but this would represent somebody on average as in their 75s.  We see quite a bit of lipping.  That means the bone is actually growing out in a way—these are known as bone spurs or osteophytes.  We see that the disk is really dried up, allowing these bone levels to actually come into contact here on the right side.  And there is lipping on the bottom, too, and creates some pinching and rubbing of the bones.  They can fracture, they can be kind of nasty, should there be any sort of inciting event to this level of the spine.

And then here we see the level of spine much, much later in life.  Again, it’s different for everybody, so this could be someone in their 75s, it could be somebody in their 90s, but for most of us, should we be lucky enough to live that long, our backs are going to look something like this.  So we see quite a bit of lipping, osteophyte formation along the edges of the bones, and they are actually touching each other in several places here, almost interlocked like teeth.  And inside there is still a disk there, but it’s very, very dried out or desiccated, as the doctors would say, so this little gray thing is what used to be the nice, healthy disk that provided lots of cushion between the two bones.  It’s now dried out, allowing the bones to come into contact, and that can set someone up for quite a painful accident or injury should that occur.

So while I explained the degeneration of the main joint in the spine–that is where the disk rests–let’s talk a little bit about the back of the spine because we have joints back there as well.  These are called facet joints.  And you can actually see the facet joints here, here, on each level of the spine here.  What those do is they restrict the spine from hyperextending, and what happens is they can degenerate as well.  There is a layer of cartilage that is in between them; that can break down.  There is going to be some bone spurring that is occurring, like we saw in the front of these models.  That can happen and cause friction of the bones, bone-on-bone contact, all of which can be painful if there is an inciting event.

So, while many of us will have this degeneration of our spine as we grow older, most of us will never know that it is occurring because we will never have symptoms of the degeneration.  So, while we may have some loss of disk space height, may have some bone spurring, most of us will never have symptoms and we will never know it is occurring.  However, if there is an inciting event, in other words, an accident or injury, some stresses that are put on that level of the spine, it can cause the symptoms to occur.  And insurance companies, unfortunately, look at the underlying degenerative changes and they say, look, it’s the degenerative changes that are causing the symptoms.  I don’t care about the car accident or the fall down the stairs or the slip on the ice or whatever; if there is degeneration here, we’re not going to pay.  And that is where Oregon law protects people, is under those situations.

So I want to thank you for watching this video on osteoarthritis, and I would invite you to

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Degenerative Disc	Annular Tears	Spine Injury
Facet Joint Injury	Disk Herniation	Exacerbation of Injury
Osteoarthritis	Preexisting Condition