Limb Length Differences after Obstetrical Brachial Plexus Injury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Residual size discrepancy between the affected and unaffected limbs is a distinct but not well-understood consequence of an obstetrical brachial plexus injury. This study aimed to document the extent of limb length differences in children with obstetrical brachial plexus injury compared with typically developing children. The effects of age, growth patterns, severity, and surgical intervention were also explored. Also, this study examined the reliability of the clinical measurement technique. METHODS: A prospective cohort of 179 children with obstetrical brachial plexus injury was systematically evaluated for limb length and girth by a multidisciplinary team. Clinical measurements were obtained at regular intervals until 12 months and then yearly. A control group of typically developing children aged 6 months to 17 years had limb length and girth measured on one occasion. RESULTS: Interrater reliability of clinical measurement techniques demonstrated high consistency, with an intraclass correlation of 0.90 (p < 0.0001). Limb measurements were recorded at nine time points. Paired t tests of children with and without surgical intervention found significant differences between affected and unaffected sides in arm, forearm, and total length as early as the 1-month measurement and at most other time points (p < 0.05). The 3-month total limb length difference was a statistically significant predictor of 12-month limb length difference (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Obstetrical brachial plexus injury significantly affects the length of the arm and forearm. Early detectable limb length deficits are associated with the likelihood of requiring surgical reconstruction. Clinical limb length measurement can be performed reliably and noninvasively.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| 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".