Topical Imiquimod 5% Cream for Pediatric Plaque Morphea: A Prospective, Multiple-Baseline, Open-Label Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND/AIMS: Therapeutic options for the treatment of plaque morphea are limited. We explored the efficacy and safety of imiquimod cream in children with plaque morphea. METHODS: Prospective, open-label, double-baseline study, using imiquimod 5% cream topically for 9 months. The primary outcome measure was improvement in the thickening of morphea plaques using a visual analog scale (VAS) and the DIET score (dyspigmentation/induration/erythema/telangiectasia). Secondary outcome measures were clinicoradiographic correlations and frequency of adverse events. RESULTS: Nine patients, 89% females, with a mean age of 11.33 years (SD = 3.52) were enrolled. At 36 weeks, the mean VAS had decreased from 48.08 (SD = 18.85) to 22.7 (SD = 12.9) (p < 0.0001), and the mean DIET score from 4.38 (SD = 1.2) to 3.06 (SD = 1.39) (p = 0.23). There was very good interrater reliability between DIET score assessments (intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC = 0.75) and VAS (ICC = 0.59) and moderate agreement between parent and investigator VAS (ICC = 0.5). Ultrasonographically measured dermis thickness changed from 1.05 (SD = 0.34) to 0.95 (SD = 0.19) (p = 0.001). One patient experienced ulceration that required temporary discontinuation of intervention. CONCLUSIONS: This proof of concept study revealed that imiquimod 5% cream is effective in decreasing the thickening of plaque morphea and safe for pediatric use. Further prospective studies are warranted.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".