Dexamethasone Therapy for Septic Arthritis in Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Prospective studies of children with septic arthritis report that adding dexamethasone to antibiotic therapy contributes significantly to clinical and laboratory improvement. This study sought to evaluate the effect of this regimen outside of a randomized controlled trial. METHODS: The sample consisted of children with septic arthritis hospitalized at a tertiary pediatric medical center in 2008 to 2013. Disease course and outcome were compared between children treated with antibiotics alone or with adjuvant dexamethasone, according to the admitting department policy. RESULTS: The cohort included 116 patients, 90 treated with antibiotics alone and 26 treated with antibiotics+dexamethasone. The groups were similar for age, symptom duration before hospitalization, body temperature, acute-phase reactant levels, and rate of positive fluid cultures (21.6% total). Compared with monotherapy, antibiotics+dexamethasone treatment was associated with a shorter duration of fever (mean 2.3 vs 3.9 days, P = .002), more rapid clinical improvement (mean 6.3 vs 10.0 days to no pain/limitation, P < .001), more rapid decrease in C-reactive protein level to <1 mg/dL (mean 5.3 vs 8.4 days, P = .002), shorter duration of parenteral antibiotic treatment (mean 7.1 vs 11.4 days, P < .001), and shorter hospital stay (mean 8.0 vs 10.7 days, P = .004). Recurrent symptoms of fever and joint pain occurred in 4 patients in the antibiotics+dexamethasone group after completion of the steroid course. CONCLUSIONS: Children with septic arthritis treated early with a short course of adjuvant dexamethasone show earlier improvement in clinical and laboratory parameters than children treated with antibiotics alone.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".