Table 4.

Review of published case series on minimally invasive resection of synovial cysts through tubular retractor.

	Present study	Sandhu et al, 2004	Sehati et al, 2006	James et al, 2012	Sukkarieh et al, 2015
Patients characteristics
n of patients	53	17	19	16	13
Mean age	63	64	64	67	66
% of synovial cyst at L4-5	75%	82%	84%	56%	69%
% of Grade 1 spondylolisthesis	34%	47%	11%	56%	31%
Operative Data
Approach	Ipsilateral	Ipsilateral	Ipsilateral	Contralateral	Contralateral
Operative time (min)	182	97	158	105	123
Average blood loss (ml)	41	35	31	<40	44
% patients discharged within 24 hours from surgery	80%	82%	68%	50%	>50%
Mean length of follow-up (months)	14.8 ± 33.7	13 ± 11.0	16 (range 4-29 mo)	14 ± 9.4	20.8 ± 16.9
Outcome (Macnab modified criteria)
Excellent	70%	82%	53%	69%	69%
Good	19%	12%	42%	31%	8%
Fair	9%	0%	5%	0%	? *
Poor	2%	6%	0%	0%	? *
Complications
Intraoperative CSF leak	4%	6%	11%	12.5%	0%
Postoperative symptomatic csf leak	2%	0%	0%	0%	0%
Postoperative instability requiring lumbar fusion	6%	6%	0%	0%	0%
Recurrence or new synovial cyst at the same level	4%	0%	0%	0%	0%

^*Authors reported patients as having persistent pain without specifying if the pain improved or stayed the same.