We are truly grateful for the opportunity to respond to this Letter to the Editor concerning our recently published study entitled “Is anterior-only fixation adequate for three-column injuries of the cervical spine? [1].” (1) The three-column concept is one of the first and broader classification systems used. The AO classification system is much fine-tuned and is still under development. Moreover, it does not use the three-column concept that is used traditionally. The initial AO classification was developed for thoracolumbar injuries [2] and was later adapted for the sub-axial cervical spine [3]. In the present study, the primary inclusion criteria were traumatic injury to the sub-axial cervical spine (anterior, middle, and posterior), and after that available data were sub classified according to the AO classification. We do accept the fact of not mentioning new additional modifiers. But we have certain limitations as this was a retrospective study (as mentioned in manuscript).
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