Early outcome and predictors of early outcome in patients treated surgically for central cord syndrome
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECT: The purpose of this study was to characterize changes in American Spinal Injury Association motor score (AMS) in the 1st week after traumatic central cord syndrome (CCS) to identify predictors of improved early outcome in patients treated with early versus delayed surgical intervention. METHODS: All patients presenting to a regional spinal cord injury center between January 2004 and June 2009 were queried for those with a diagnosis of CCS. Patients treated conservatively were excluded. A prospectively maintained spinal cord injury database was used to track AMS throughout each patient's hospitalization. Hospital records provided information regarding demographics, presenting neurological examination, imaging findings, comorbidities, timing and nature of surgical procedures, and length of stay (LOS) in the hospital and intensive care unit (ICU). Patients were separated into those who underwent early surgery, within 1 day of presentation (early group), and those who underwent surgery on a delayed basis (delayed group). Differences between groups were analyzed using the Student t-test and chi-square test. Predictors of outcome were identified using correlation analysis and multiple linear regression. RESULTS: Of 426 patients in the database, 80 (18.8%) were diagnosed as having CCS, and 68 of them ultimately underwent surgical decompression. Nineteen (28%) of 68 patients underwent surgery within 1 day of presentation (early group) while the remaining 49 patients (72%) underwent surgery on a delayed basis (delayed group). The mean age in the early group was significantly younger than that of the delayed group (52 vs 59 years, p = 0.049). Other characteristics were similar between groups including sex, proportion of patients with cord edema on MRI (44% early vs 55% delayed, p = 0.47), and proportion of patients with cervical fracture (26% early vs 28% delayed, p = 0.98). Patients in the early group presented with an AMS of 62.5 versus 70.0 for the delayed group (p = 0.36). No difference in the change in AMS was seen at 7 days between the early group (-2.9 points) and the delayed group (-4.2 points) (p = 0.34). Additionally, the number of patients who had early improvement was similar between the early and delayed groups (50% vs. 48%, respectively, p = 0.94). Neither time in the ICU (3.4 vs. 3.4 days, p = 0.84) nor the overall LOS (10.5 vs 12.5 days, p = 0.59) was different in the early versus delayed groups, respectively. Correlation analysis and multiple linear regression demonstrated early surgery was not associated with change in AMS or AMS at Day 7. Age was identified as the only significant predictor of change in AMS and had a negative effect (coefficient = -0.34, p = 0.025). CONCLUSIONS: Early treatment of patients with CCS remains controversial. Although some long-term neurological recovery is expected in patients with a CCS, surgeons and patients should not expect early neurological improvement with or without early operative intervention.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".