Spine Institute physicians awarded top research honors | Business

Research physicians with the Spine Institute of Louisiana were recently honored with this year’s top research award: the 2012 Outstanding Paper Award for Surgical Science.

The honors came at the North American Spine Society’s 27th Annual Meeting, which was held October 24-27 in Dallas.

Drs. Pierce Nunley, Ajay Jawahar, David Cavanaugh, Charles Gordon, Euby Kerr and Andrew Utter won the award for their research paper entitled, Symptomatic Adjacent Segment Disease Following Cervical Total Disc Replacement:  Reexamining the Clinical and Radiological Evidence with Established Criteria.

This is the only “author group” with the same research physicians to win this award for a second time. 

“No one else has won this award twice,” says Dr. Nunley, Medical Director of the Spine Institute of Louisiana and Associate Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at the LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. 

NASS and The Spine Journal also awarded physicians with the Spine Institute of Louisiana the Outstanding Paper Award for Surgical Science in 2010.

In addition to the top award of $10,000.00, the research paper will be published in The Spine Journal, an international and multidisciplinary journal "...that publishes original, peer-reviewed articles on research and treatment related to the spin....” 

Dr. Jawahar, Medical Research Director, says the Spine Institute of Louisiana Foundation will use the award money to further efforts in spine research.   

Last year, the Foundation was awarded the “21st Century Grant” of over $80,700.00.00 by the Cervical Spine Research Society; the second time the CSRS has awarded the Spine Institute of Louisiana a grant for excellence in scientific research.