I am new to the forum but I wanted to share with you what my neurosurgeon just shared with me about this subject. He did a thin cut MRI with contratst for 200 of his patients to see if this gave a definitive answer as to whether or not to do a MVD. After doing MVDs on all of these patients and analyzing the outcome, he found that the MRI was not a good predicting tool to tell if a person had a compression or not. He would look at the MRI and find no compression and open the person up and they had a compression. Therefore after this study and analysis he found that the thin cut MRI did not give a good definitive answer.

Although from my perspective it would be great if you could actually see the compression before surgery. It would be reassuring.

I brought to him a MRI that was thin cut with contrast but it wasn't thin enough. It was 8 months old. He could not see a compression and he did not have me do another MRI bc of his findings above. Another Neursurgeon in Austin (St. Davids) told me he found the same thing in his practice - that an MRI that didn't show a compression didn't mean that there wasn't a compression.

The neurosurgeon that I am talking about is Dr. Jonathan White at UT Southwestern in Dallas. He is involved in the TNA and speaks with Dr. Janetta. He does about 30-40 of these surgeries a year since 1990 I believe.