Coccygectomy for chronic refractory coccygodynia: clinical case series and literature review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECT: Coccygodynia is disabling pain in the coccyx and is usually provoked by sitting or rising from sitting. The diagnosis can be missed by neurosurgeons likely to encounter the disorder, and surgical treatment for coccygodynia has historically been viewed with caution. The authors conducted a retrospective review of 62 successive coccygectomy surgeries for coccygodynia performed at their institution. METHODS: Sixty-two consecutive cases of coccygectomy for coccygodynia in 61 unique patients were identified from the surgical database; they had been treated between 1997 and 2009. The authors succeeded in contacting 26 patients for follow-up (42.6%). A retrospective chart review was performed, and a telephone questionnaire was administered to these patients. Data collected included cause, pre- and postoperative visual analog scale, a graded outcome measure, and patient satisfaction. The median follow-up time was 37 months (range 2-133 months). RESULTS: The clinical results among the 26 patients with follow-up were as follows: 13 excellent, 9 good, 2 fair, and 2 poor. The overall favorable (excellent and good) outcome after coccygectomy was 84.6%. There were 3 wound infections (11.5%). There were no rectal injuries. An overwhelming majority of patients were satisfied with the procedure. CONCLUSIONS: The authors report the results of their clinical case series, which to date is the largest in North America. The results closely concur with previously published case series from Europe. Coccygectomy for chronic intractable coccygodynia is simple and effective, with a low complication rate. A comprehensive literature review and discussion of coccygectomy is provided.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".