The vast majority of patients with scoliosis fall under the category of idiopathic scoliosis. That means, simply, we don’t know what causes it. We don’t have unified field theories that tell us the mechanism.

However, there are those cases that are neurological, where there’s some kind of spinal cord or brain injury, cerebral palsy, poliomyelitis — any one of these neurological disorders.

And there’s trauma — an induced spinal cord injury.

There are congenital abnormalities of the spinal cord and of the vertebrae which lead to scoliosis.

And finally, there are the so-called developmental abnormalities, and those are the ones that are the most concerning. To describe this anomaly, one should envision that the original component parts are made wrong at the factory — either the vertebrae are congenitally malformed or congenitally fused together, leading to very severe curves, or the underlying spinal cord.”  In some of these situations, we are looking for links to drugs, medications, environmental features, environmental causes, which put children at risk when they are in the mother’s uterus.