Five MRI metrics showed differences suggestive of tissue injury in ASCC compared with uncompressed subjects (p<0.05), while a composite of all 10 measures (average of z scores) showed highly significant differences (p=0.002).
7 MCL CSA was also (non-significantly) larger in uncompressed subjects, but the ratio of MCL to rostral CSA showed a trend towards being decreased in ASCC, indicating that the mild compression observed in ASCC subjects has only a minor effect on CSA, and normalisation by rostral values helps to mitigate the high intersubject variability of this measure. 7 14 Although the groups with and without cord compression differed significantly in age and weight, all MRI metrics were corrected for age and none showed significant variation with weight.