Bangalore, Mar 30, 2010: Spine surgeon Dr J Naresh Babu of Mediciti Hospitals, Hyderabad, India, has been honored with the prestigious Asia Pacific Orthopedic Association (APOA) International Spine Award for 2010. He shares the honor with two other spine surgeons from Japan and Hong Kong.

APOA is an organization of orthopedic surgeons from the 17 countries of the Asia Pacific region. The objective of APOA is to advance research in the field of orthopedic surgery. The APOA Spine Award is given once in two years to the significant research and clinical work done in the field of spine surgery.

Dr Naresh received this year’s Award for his pioneering work on treating low back pain with minimal invasive surgery. In contrary to the traditional open surgery which involves cutting the muscles and bones, he devised a new surgical technique and approach where in the surgery including placing the screws in to the bone could be carried out without cutting the muscles and bone.

Dr Naresh had his advanced spine training at the Rush University, Chicago, US and at National University Hospital, Singapore. He has been associated with Mediciti Hospital for over a year now, where much of his pioneering research work has been carried out.

His research on skeletal fluorosis at Mediciti hospital won the Silver Jubilee Research Award from the Indian Orthopedic Association in 2009.

In addition to these, Dr Naresh has also honored with the prestigious ASSI Gold Medal given by the Association of Spine Surgeons of India (ASSI) for outstanding research conducted by surgeons less than 40 years of age. At its Annual Conference held in Nagpur, India earlier this month, the ASSI eminent panel of experts chose Dr Naresh’s paper on Correction of Severe Deformities of the Spine in Children over 150 other works presented at the Conference.

Correction of hunch back deformities of the spine is complex and requires precision. The most worried complication of the deformity correction is injury to nerves. Dr Naresh has done pioneering research in this field and devised new surgical technique of correcting the hunch back deformities of the spine without causing injury to the nerves. He showed the success of this new technique in 15 patients with severe hunch back.