Surgical Treatment of Greater Occipital Neuralgia by Neurolysis of the Greater Occipital Nerve and Sectioning of the Inferior Oblique Muscle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate a new surgical treatment consisting of neurolysis of the great occipital nerve and section of the inferior oblique muscle. DESIGN.: A retrospective study of 10 patients operated for greater occipital neuralgia. SUMMARY AND BACKGROUND DATA: This technique is based on a previous anatomic cadaver study. The greater occipital nerve is stretched by the inferior oblique muscle of the head during flexion of the cervical spine. Sectioning this muscle relaxes the greater occipital nerve. With this procedure, the authors systematically associate release of the nerve down to the inferior edge of the inferior oblique muscle. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted of 10 patients operated on from January 1998 to December 1999 for greater occipital neuralgia. All the patients had pain exacerbated by flexion of the cervical spine. The average age of the patients was 62 years. The mean follow-up of the series was 37 months. The results of the treatment were assessed according to three criteria: 1) degree of pain on a Visual Analogue Scale before surgery, at 3 months, and at last follow-up; 2) consumption of analgesics before surgery and at follow-up; and 3) the degree of patient satisfaction at follow-up. RESULTS: In three cases, anatomic anomalies were found. One patient had hypertrophy of the venous plexus around C2. In another, the nerve penetrated the inferior oblique muscle. The third had degenerative C1-C2 osteoarthritis requiring associated C1-C2 arthrodesis. The mean Visual Analogue Scale score was 80/100 before surgery and 20/100 at last follow-up. Consumption of analgesics decreased in all patients. Seven of the 10 patients were very satisfied or satisfied with the operation. CONCLUSION: This surgical technique gives good results on greater occipital neuralgia if patients are well chosen. Nerve release is justified by the frequency of associated anatomic abnormalities.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".