Thermal Pain and Sensory Processing in Children With Sickle Cell Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Early tissue injury and recurrent pain in sickle cell disease (SCD) may alter pain and sensory processing. In this study, we evaluate thermal pain and sensory processing for 27 children aged 10.3 to 18.3 years with SCD and 28 African-American control patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Outcome measures included heat and cold detection thresholds, heat and cold pain thresholds, and thermal perceptual sensitization at the volar surface of the dominant forearm and thenar eminence of the nondominant hand. RESULTS: Children with SCD were less sensitive to heat detection (P=0.006) and cold detection (P=0.015) stimuli at the thenar eminence compared with controls. At the forearm, no difference was found between groups for cold (P=0.58) or heat (P=0.07) detection thresholds. Children with SCD had increased sensitivity to cold pain at the forearm (P=0.03) compared with controls, but not when measured at the thenar eminence (P=0.084). There was no evidence that children with SCD had altered heat pain thresholds compared with controls. There was no difference between groups for perceptual sensitization at the thenar eminence (41% vs. 39%) (χ=0.15, P>0.1) or at the forearm (30% vs. 36%) (χ=0.23, P>0.5). DISCUSSION: Three of ten quantitative sensory tests were found to differ between groups. These results suggest that SCD may influence pain and sensory processing in children, but our interpretation is necessarily cautious. Due to the small differences in measures found between groups, further investigation is required to confirm our findings. If confirmed, the development of population-specific reference standards for quantitative sensory testing may emerge as a useful clinical tool for pain physicians in identifying and quantifying pain and sensory processing in children with SCD.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".