The posterior longitudinal ligament might be ossified and enlarged with aging, and then the cervical spinal cord around the ligament is compressed. As the results, numbness of a limb and disturbance of perceptions which are paralysis of pain and/or temperature senses occur in human body. In this paper, the stress distributions in the cervical spinal cord compressed by ossificated posterior longitudinal ligament were calculated by two-dimensional finite element method and the effect of the shape of the ossificated posterior longitudinal ligament on the stress distributions were investigated. The stresses were concentrated around the anterior horn and dorsal horn in the gray matter and lateral funiculus in the white matter in the case of flat ossificated ligament (α = 0°), and center part of spinal cord in the case of triangle ossificated ligament (α = 25°).
