Dr. Walter Salubro Interviews Dr. Jeb McAviney, Scoliosis Expert, Lecturer, CEO of ScoliCare, and Founder of ScoliBrace
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Dr. Walter Salubro:
Okay. So you talked about screening. So how important is early screening and early detection? And you know, like when, when should parents even be thinking about this for their kids.
Dr. Jeb McAviney:
Yeah. It’s absolutely critical that we, first of all, if parents have a family history of scoliosis, you need to be mindful of it really throughout development. We do have forms of scoliosis that developed an infantile age zero to three or juvenile age. And if you have a family history, you need to be looking at them. For the general population where there’s no family history, typically for girls between the age of 10 and 12. This is the time when their body starting to develop and study. And that’s a time that we need to be doing screening. Scoliosis Research Society recommends doing screening twice for girls, the age 10 under the age of 12. And that way you captured that variance in their growth. Boys, they tend to develop physically a little bit later, between the age of 13 and 14. It’s only recommended that we screen once for them. And the reason why we screen, however, is if you intervene early, we get better results. And the earlier we intervene, the less invasive the treatments are. So for example, there’s good evidence now to show that if we catch the curves before they’re 25 degrees, we don’t even need to necessarily use a brace. We can use scoliosis specific exercise. It’s been shown to be able to change the natural history. In other words, to change the progression of the scoliosis early screening leads to less invasive interventions and better results. Now that’s not the say it’s picked up late we can’t do anything.
Dr. Walter Salubro:
So with the screening, is it an observational thing? Is something that parents can do? Or is going to be professional screening with an x-ray during those times.
Dr. Jeb McAviney:
Well, all the above? I think, I think from the very basic parents need to look at their children. Usually it’s usually parents that pick something up. Particularly around this time of year where, you know, we’re moving from the winter into the summer. The kids have had lots of clothes on to cover themselves up. Maybe the first time we go to a pool or, you know, we’re putting a dress on and then we see something different that we didn’t notice last year. We see a tilt in the shoulders. When see those things, I think the key message for all the non-clinicians is, today is, don’t ignore it. Go on and see someone. Go on and take action because it might be nothing but if you see something and you intervene earlier, you’re going to get a better result. For professionals, we use a little device called a scoliometer and it’s like a little meter and gives some objective evidence to help us understand if there is any rotation in the spine. But one thing we have developed particularly for parents is an app called ScoliScreen. ScoliScreen, we actually developed it to compare to a scoliometer. And we sent to Macquarie University and they did a study on it to validate its use and they found we had 70% agreement between the results on the scoliometer for the scoliosis patients and the ScoliScreen. The idea here is that you can look at it on your phone. You can look at it along a computer and you can stand with your child there and go through the seven questions that it has. And then it gives you a score of a lot of medium or high risk. And so people want to find it at app.scoliscreen.com.
Dr. Walter Salubro:
Yeah, very cool. And I put a snapshot or a screenshot of it on the, on the screen here. And people can look at that.
Dr. Jeb McAviney:
So it’s a, it’s a website that you can access off any device.
Dr. Walter Salubro:
That’s right. Again, I want to say that’ pretty phenomenal. And then of course based on that screening result, they can go search for a scoliosis type doctor to help them, you know, get some care. It’s great.
Dr. Jeb McAviney:
Absolutely.
Read Related Articles:
Part 1 of 10 | What Is Scoliosis? (Dr. Walter Salubro Interviews Dr. Jeb McAviney)
Part 2 of 10 | Scoliosis 3D Deformity Explained | Dr. Walter Salubro Interviews Dr. Jeb McAviney
Screening App for Mobile or Desktop
ScoliScreen
