Oral prednisone taper following intravenous steroids fails to improve disability or recovery from relapses in multiple sclerosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A short course of intravenous methylprednisolone (IVMP) followed by oral prednisone taper (OPT) is often used for the treatment of relapses in multiple sclerosis (MS). We examined the effect of IVMP plus OPT compared with IVMP only on neurologic disability 1 year after treatment of a relapse in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. METHODS: Two hundred eighty-five consecutive relapses were analyzed in a retrospective fashion. One hundred fifty-two patients with a total of 171 relapses received IVMP plus an OPT at the time of relapse whilst 112 patients who experienced 114 relapses received IVMP without OPT. RESULTS: There was no difference between the two groups in the baseline characteristics as well as the mean or categorical EDSS at baseline, at the time of relapse confirmation, and at months 3, 6 and 12 after relapse confirmation. CONCLUSION: Our observations suggest that OPT following treatment with IVMP for an MS relapse does not lead to improved neurologic outcome after 12 months compared with treatment with IVMP only. Moreover, our findings raise concerns regarding the common practice of using OPT following IVMP. Further studies are indicated to validate our findings and minimize exposure to systemic corticosteroids, well known for systemic toxicity.
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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 | 0.004 |
| 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 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".