A Pilot Evaluation of the Role of Bracing in Stable Thoracolumbar Burst Fractures Without Neurological Deficit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Prospective, 2-center, observer-blinded, randomized controlled trial. OBJECTIVE: Investigate clinical and radiologic outcomes of bracing versus no-bracing in the treatment of stable thoracolumbar burst fractures. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Management of thoracolumbar burst fractures depends upon clinical presentation of neurological deficit and radiographic features of fracture severity. Neurologically intact patients with mild deformity and biomechanical stability may be treated with conservative therapy. METHODS: Patients with stable (AO type A3), single level, thoracolumbar burst fractures between T12 and L2 with no neurological deficit were randomized to nonoperative treatment with a customized thoracolumbosacral orthosis (TLSO) or no-brace. Self-reported clinical outcomes of pain, disability, and health-related quality of life, and radiographic outcomes of kyphotic progression and loss of vertebral height, assessed by 2 independent reviewers blinded to treatment group, were measured at 6 months follow-up. RESULTS: Twenty-three consecutive eligible patients were included (TLSO: n=12; no-brace: n=11). There were no between-group differences regarding level of injury (P=0.75) and baseline spine geometry including fractional canal compromise (P=0.49), anterior loss of vertebral body height (P=0.28), and sagittal Cobb angle (P=0.13). In-hospital stay was significantly shorter in the no-brace group (mean: 2.8±3.0 d) compared with the TLSO group (mean: 6.3±2.1 d; P=0.004). At follow-up there were no differences in anterior loss of vertebral body height (TLSO: 12.5%±10.2% vs. no-brace: 11.9%±8.1%; P=0.88), kyphotic progression (TLSO: 5.3±4.4 degrees vs. no-brace 5.2±3.6 degrees; P=0.93), adverse events, or self-reported clinical outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Neurologically intact patients with stable thoracolumbar burst fractures treated with or without bracing had similar radiographic and clinical outcomes at 6 months follow-up. The no-brace group had shorter in-hospital lengths of stay. Conservative therapy involving early mobilization without brace immobilization may be warranted. Further studies with a larger series of patients and longer follow-up are required for conclusive findings.
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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".