Lack of Specificity of the 6-Minute Walk Test as an Outcome Measure for Patients with Systemic Sclerosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The 6-minute walk test (6MWT) is an important prognostic tool in various cardiovascular diseases and has been considered as a surrogate endpoint. However, conflicting results have been reported in systemic sclerosis (SSc). Our objective was to evaluate the relationships of the 6-min walking distance (6MWD) and organ damage in SSc. METHODS: Eighty-seven consecutive patients with SSc were included and prospectively investigated; they underwent 6MWT in addition to conventional assessment of possible lung, heart, kidney, skin, and muscle involvement, and disease activity scoring, severity, and quality of life determination. RESULTS: Twenty-six patients (30%) had an abnormal 6MWT and the mean 6MWD was 461.8 +/- 103.0 m. When considering 6MWT as a binary variable - normal or abnormal - C-reactive protein (CRP) was the only independent variable associated with abnormal 6MWT. Considered as a continuous variable, the 6MWD was associated with measures of lung involvement and inflammation, with the activity and severity of disease, and also with quality of life; nevertheless, calcinosis was the only independent factor associated in multivariate analyses with a trend for an association for CRP. CONCLUSION: The 6MWD relates to broad factors in SSc and these results raise doubts about the specificity of the 6MWD in this systemic disease, and its relevance to monitoring therapy.
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 | 0.009 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".