A case of indirect cauda equina syndrome from metastatic prostate cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report the case of a patient with metastatic hormone refractory prostate cancer in whom "indirect" cauda equina syndrome developed concurrent with multilevel spinal cord compression (SCC). Three months after his first positive bone scan, a 65-year-old otherwise healthy man presented with severe back pain, bilateral lower extremity paresthesias, leg weakness and urinary retention. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed a dural-based mass causing SCC at the T9, T10 and T11 vertebrae, with a normal cauda equina. He received corticosteroids and palliative external beam radiotherapy, resulting in good pain control and gradual improvement in his neurological symptoms. He did well for 8 months, at which time his residual bilateral leg weakness abruptly worsened and he experienced numbness, paresthesias, urinary incontinence and constipation. Repeat MRI showed progression of epidural metastatic disease compressing the spinal cord or thecal sac at 7 thoracic vertebral levels. The cauda equina was also distorted and flattened without evidence of direct solid tumour impingement. We hypothesized that the etiology was increased intrathecal pressure due to disrupted cerebrospinal fluid flow resulting from multiple levels of upstream thecal sac compression. It is essential to image the entire spinal cord and cauda equina when patients with metastatic bone disease present with neurological symptoms to institute correct treatment and preserve function and mobility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".