Spine surgeon Dr J Naresh Babu of Mediciti Hospitals, Hyderabad has been bestowed with the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association (APOA) International Spine Award for 2010. Along with this, Dr Naresh has also been honoured with the prestigious ASSI Gold Medal by the Association of Spine Surgeons of India (ASSI) for outstanding research conducted by surgeons less than 40 years of age.

Dr Naresh received the APOA 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. This is the first time that an orthopaedic surgeon from the state has been presented with this Award, which he received at the International Spine Training Centre, Chonnam National University, South Korea. He shares the honour with two other spine surgeons - from Japan and Hong Kong.

The objective of APOA is to advance research in the field of orthopaedic 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 Babu is the first National Board accredited spine surgeon from Andhra Pradesh. He had his advanced spine training at the famous Rush University, Chicago, USA and at National University Hospital, Singapore. He has been associated with the Mediciti Hospital for over a year now. His research on skeletal fluorosis done at the department received the highest honour of the country, Silver Jubilee Research Award from the Indian Orthopedic Association last year.

At its Annual Conference held in Nagpur earlier this month, the ASSI eminent panel of experts chose his 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.

For Dr. Naresh Babu, the recent honours come in a long line of awards and recognitions - a total of 10 international and 15 national awards. Amongst others, his work on usage of Nimodipine to increase the blood supply to the spinal disc received the Euro spine international award by the European Spine Society at Geneva, while other research on scoliosis correction by key hole surgery received Young investigator Award given by the Singapore Orthopaedic Association. He has also bagged the ISSLS Best Spine Research Award for his work on disc nutrition.