Therapeutic effects of prolotherapy with intra-articular dextrose injection in patients with moderate knee osteoarthritis: a single-arm study with 6 months follow up
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Prolotherapy is an injection-based complementary treatment, which has shown promising results in the treatment of different musculoskeletal disorders. The aim of this study was to determine the therapeutic efficacy of dextrose prolotherapy on pain, range of motion, and function in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). METHODS: In this single-arm prospective study, participants with symptomatic moderate knee osteoarthritis underwent prolotherapy with intra-articular injection of 20% dextrose water at baseline, and at 4 weeks and 8 weeks later. Patients were followed for 24 weeks. Pain severity at rest and activity, according to the visual analog scale (VAS), articular range of motion (ROM), and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities arthritis index (WOMAC) scores were measured at baseline, 4, 8, and 24 weeks later. RESULTS: A total of 24 female patients (average age: 58.37 ± 11.8 years old) received 3-monthly injection therapies. Before the treatment, the mean articular range of motion was 105.41 ± 11.22°. Mean VAS scale at rest and activity was 8.83 ± 1.37 and 9.37 ± 1.31, respectively. At the end of week 24, knee ROM increased by 8°. Pain severity in rest and activity decreased to 4.87 ± 1.39, 45.86%, and 44.23%, respectively (p < 0.001). Total WOMAC score and its subcategories showed a continuous improvement trend in all the evaluation sessions, so that at the end of the study, the total score decreased by 30.5 ± 14.27 points (49.58%) (p < 0.001). Improvements of all parameters were considerable until week 8, and were maintained throughout the study period. CONCLUSIONS: Prolotherapy with three intra-articular injections of hypertonic dextrose given 4 weeks apart for selected patients with knee OA, resulted in significant improvement of validated pain, ROM, and WOMAC-based function scores, when baseline levels were compared at 24 weeks. Further studies with randomized controlled trials involving a comparison group are suggested to confirm these findings.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".