Vertebral augmentation has been one of my favorite spine treatments since I performed my first case in 1994 and saw the incredibly good and immediate results. This was done under the aegis of Dr. John Mathis, who published the last comprehensive work on vertebral augmentation in 2006. Fourteen years later, we have seen significant advancements in techniques, literature, and augmentation devices and all of these topics have been covered in this book.

What we know now about the treatment of vertebral compression fractures (VCFs) that we didn’t know a decade ago is that treating these fractures with augmentation is demonstrably life-saving and life-prolonging and is one of the very few things we do in medicine that attains this benchmark. To break it down to a personal level for those practitioners performing vertebral augmentation, the number of patients needed to treat (statistically called the NNT) to save 1 life at 1 year is only 15 patients and, on the average, additional life expectancy of each treated patient will be between 2 and 7 years.