New Scoliosis Procedure Helps One-Time Olympic Hopeful Compete Again

In 1980, Michele Pease-Downey's dream was to qualify for the U.S. Olympic swimming team. At 60, her dream was to continue walking. The lifelong swimmer needed a cane and, by 2018, the occasional wheelchair, due to increasing pain in her legs. She also experienced an odd and troubling sensation. "I couldn't breathe whenever I laid down on my left side," Pease-Downey said. "It would make me have panic attacks because I couldn't understand why I couldn't breathe." Degenerative scoliosis is not the kind gym teachers look for in young adolescents. It's caused not by growth but by progressive degeneration of structural spinal elements leading to spinal column malalignment, according to a 2011 review of the condition in the Musculoskeletal Journal of Hospital for Special Surgery, which estimated its prevalence in the adult population at 6 to 68 percent.