Anterior cervical spine surgical complications: Safety comparison between teacher and student

Anterior cervical surgery has a widespread use. Despite its popularity, this surgery can lead to serious and life-threatening complications, and warrants the attention of skilled attending spinal surgeons with many years of experience. We retrospectively evaluated postoperative complications occurring in 110 patients who underwent anterior cervical surgery (anterior cervical discectomy without fusion, anterior cervical discectomy and fusion, and anterior cervical disc arthroplasty) between 2013 and 2020. These operations were performed by an either an attending surgeon with 30 years' experience versus a novice neurosurgeon (NN) with