Improvement in Quality of Life with Use of an Unloader Knee Brace in Active Patients with OA: A Prospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine if short form (SF)-12 physical component would increase with unloader brace use. Patient expectations and predictors of significant improvement were determined. Our hypothesis was that patients with unloader braces will have increases in general physical health (SF-12) and function (Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index [WOMAC]). Patients were enrolled in institutional review board-approved prospective cohort study. They completed a self-administered questionnaire (SF-12; WOMAC, Tegner activity scale, expectations) at enrollment, 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and 6 months. In this study, 39 patients, 23 males and 16 females (average age = 61 years [range 44 to 87]), were prescribed an unloader brace. Patients had significant improvement in quality of life (SF-12) (p < 0.05). There was significant improvement in pain, stiffness, and function (WOMAC) (p < 0.05). Patients who reported Tegner of 3 or greater at final follow-up had significantly higher SF-12 physical component (48 vs. 37; p = 0.023). Return to recreational sports was very important in 83% and somewhat important in 17%. Improving ability to walk was very important in 89%. Pain relief was very important in 69%, somewhat important in 17%. Of these, 39% expected most pain to be relieved and 57% expected all pain to be relieved. The most important expectations were to have confidence in knee (97% very important), avoid future knee degeneration (90% very important), and improve ability to maintain general health (93% very important). Patients demonstrated a significant decrease in pain and disability. Patients saw improvement in SF-12 physical component. Braces specifically designed to unload the degenerative compartment of the knee can be an effective treatment to decrease pain and maintain activity level to increase overall physical health.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".