Gait Analysis of Children Treated for Clubfoot with Physical Therapy or the Ponseti Cast Technique
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Currently, clubfoot is initially treated with nonoperative methods including the Ponseti cast technique and the French functional physical therapy program. Our goal was to evaluate the function of children treated with these techniques. METHODS: We reviewed the cases of 182 patients with idiopathic clubfoot (273 feet) who were initially treated nonoperatively. Seventy-seven patients (119 feet) were excluded because they had either received a combination of nonoperative treatments or had undergone surgery prior to testing. Gait analysis was performed when the children were approximately two years of age. Temporal and kinematic data were classified as abnormal if they were more than one standard deviation from normal. RESULTS: Gait analysis was performed on 105 patients (fifty-six treated with casts and forty-nine treated with physical therapy) with 154 involved feet (seventy-nine treated with casts and seventy-five treated with physical therapy). These patients were an average of two years and three months of age, and their initial Diméglio scores ranged between 10 and 17. No significant differences in cadence parameters were found between the two groups. The rate of normal kinematic ankle motion in the sagittal plane was higher in the group treated with physical therapy (65% of the feet) than it was in the group treated with the Ponseti cast technique (47%) (p = 0.0317). More children treated with physical therapy walked with knee hyperextension (37% of the feet) (p < 0.0001), an equinus gait (15%) (p = 0.0051), and footdrop (19%) (p = 0.0072); only one patient treated with casts walked with an equinus gait, and only three demonstrated footdrop. In contrast, more of the patients in the cast-treatment group demonstrated excessive stance-phase dorsiflexion (48% of the feet) (p < 0.0001) and a calcaneus gait (10%). More feet in the physical therapy group had an increased internal foot progression angle (44% compared with 24% in the cast-treatment group; p = 0.0144) and increased shank-based foot rotation (73% compared with 57% in the cast-treatment group; p = 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: While the rate of normal kinematic ankle motion in the sagittal plane was 65% in the group treated with physical therapy, the gait abnormalities that were seen in that group were characterized by mild equinus and/or footdrop. The rate of normal kinematic ankle motion in the sagittal plane was 47% in the cast-treatment group, but the most common gait abnormality in this group was mildly increased dorsiflexion in the stance phase. The rates of calcaneus gait and equinus gait were
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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".