Brief Report: Lumbar Spinal Stenosis Is a Highly Genetic Condition Partly Mediated by Disc Degeneration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Lumbar spinal stenosis is one of the most commonly diagnosed spinal disorders in older adults. Although the pathophysiology of the clinical syndrome is not well understood, a narrow central canal or intervertebral foramen is an essential or defining feature. The aim of the present study was to estimate the magnitude of genetic versus environmental influences on central lumbar spinal stenosis and to investigate disc degeneration and stature or bone development as possible genetic pathways. Methods A classic twin study with multivariate analyses considering lumbar level and other covariates was conducted. The study sample comprised 598 male twins (147 monozygotic and 152 dizygotic pairs), 35–70 years of age, from the population‐based Finnish Twin Cohort. The primary phenotypes were central lumbar stenosis as assessed qualitatively on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and quantitatively measured dural sac cross‐sectional area. Additional phenotypes (to examine possible genetic pathways) included disc bulging and standing height, as an indicator of overall skeletal size or development. Results The heritability estimate (h 2 ) for qualitatively assessed central lumbar spinal stenosis on MRI was 66.9% (95% confidence interval [95% CI] 56.8, 74.5). The broad‐sense heritability estimate for dural sac cross‐sectional area was 81.2% (95% CI 74.5, 86.1), with a similar magnitude of genetic influences across lumbar levels (h 2 = 72.4–75.6). The additive genetic correlation of quantitatively assessed stenosis and disc bulging was extremely high. There was no indication of shared genetic influences between stenosis and stature. Conclusion Central lumbar spinal stenosis and associated dural sac dimensions are highly genetic, and disc degeneration (bulging) appears to be one pathway through which genes influence spinal stenosis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".