Dr. Howard An, director of Spine Surgery and the Spine Fellowship at Rush was recently honored at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. Dr. An was presented with a Kappa Delta Award for the paper, "Intervertebral Disc Repair or Regeneration by Growth Factor and/or Cytokine Inhibitor Protein Injection." The Kappa Delta Awards recognize those who are helping to close the gap between basic research and clinical medicine.

For more than a decade, Dr. An and his colleagues at Rush University Medical Center have researched intervertebral disc degeneration, facet joint osteoarthritis, lumbar spinal stenosis, and degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis in order to better understand the relationship between intervertebral disc degeneration and low back pain. Dr. An explained that low back pain "remains a symptom rather than a precise diagnosis, and neither current nonsurgical nor surgical treatments are scientific or evidence-based." The FDA recently approved clinical trials of compounds created though this research.