Growth Patterns in Children with Congenital Vertebral Anomaly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Height and weight data in children with congenital vertebral anomaly, recorded routinely during clinical follow-up, were analyzed. OBJECTIVES: To determine whether these children are significantly deficient in growth or show an abnormality of maturation. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Structural abnormalities in the vertebral column, and surgery to prevent or correct deformity secondary to this, clearly have the potential to affect the individual's final height. It is not clear, however, whether this is the whole problem, or whether there are other factors to be considered. METHODS: The height and weight of patients with all forms of spinal deformity are routinely recorded at outpatient visits. Data from patients with congenital vertebral abnormalities were analyzed and compared with the national standards. To test the possibility that the observed short stature might be familial, family groups (parents and siblings of patients) were invited to be measured. RESULTS: At the end of growth, patients with congenital vertebral anomalies were smaller than average and also smaller than their parents and siblings. This was more marked in girls and in the presence of associated anomalies, especially when multiple, as in VACTERL association (vertebral, anal, cardiac, tracheal, esophageal, renal, and limb anomalies). It was also exacerbated by surgery, which had a demonstrable stunting effect on the spine. DISCUSSION: Although shortening of the spine was demonstrated in patients with prior spinal surgery, the contributions of the fact of surgery and the presumed severity of anatomic abnormality could not be differentiated. The observations that, even without surgery, girls were generally on a lower percentile than boys and that both have a tendency to lose height at growth spurt invite further investigation. CONCLUSIONS: The shortening of the spine by surgery is not a contraindication to treatment, because a straight, balanced spine must always be preferable to a longer, crooked and unbalanced one. However, it is another facet to be remembered when considering the management plan of the whole child.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 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".