Skylar Wendt, 13, of Appleton has a brown belt in karate and is working diligently toward her black belt. Given how active she is, her parents, Carrie and Brad Wendt, say you probably wouldn’t realize she has scoliosis.
“It doesn’t seem to affect her,” Carrie said. “She is very active in her karate. I don’t think it slowed her down any.”
There are many forms of scoliosis, said Dr. Sumon Bhattacharjee, a neurosurgeon with the Neuroscience Group in Neenah. Bhattacharjee has a special interest in managing patients with scoliosis and received specialized training in surgical interventions related to spinal deformities in adults and pediatric patients.
“Scoliosis is kind of a generic term that we use for what we call curvature of the spine,” he said. “Nowadays we’re more inclined to use the word spinal deformity, which is to mean an abnormality in the curvature of the spine.
“Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis is what we see in middle school and going into early high school. It’s much more prevalent in females than males, suggesting some genetic aspect behind it. We have genetic markers that tell us that these are scoliotic genes, but we have yet to establish a direct relationship between who will exactly have it. We don’t have a one-to-one predictor, but there’s a huge amount of genetic correlation and growth pattern changes that contribute to developing scoliosis.”
