Effect of Low-dose Oral Prednisolone on Symptoms and Systemic Inflammation in Older Adults with Moderate to Severe Knee Osteoarthritis: A Randomized Placebo-controlled Trial
Post-publication record
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To investigate the efficacy of 6 weeks of daily low-dose oral prednisolone in improving pain, mobility, and systemic low-grade inflammation in the short term and whether the effect would be sustained at 12 weeks in older adults with moderate to severe knee osteoarthritis (OA). METHODS: A total of 125 patients with primary knee OA were randomized 1:1; 63 received 7.5 mg/day of prednisolone and 62 received placebo for 6 weeks. Outcome measures included pain reduction and improvement in function scores and systemic inflammation markers. Pain was assessed using the visual analog pain scale (0-100 mm). Secondary outcome measures included the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index scores, patient global assessment (PGA) of the severity of knee OA, and 6-min walk distance (6MWD). Serum levels of interleukin 1 (IL-1), IL-6, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) were measured. RESULTS: There was a clinically relevant reduction in the intervention group compared to the placebo group for knee pain, physical function, PGA, and 6MWD at 6 weeks. The mean difference between treatment arms (95% CI) was 10.9 (4.8-18.0), p < 0.001; 9.5 (3.7-15.4), p < 0.05; 15.7 (5.3-26.1), p < 0.001; and 86.9 (29.8-144.1), p < 0.05, respectively. Further, there was a clinically relevant reduction in the serum levels of IL-1, IL-6, TNF-α, and hsCRP at 6 weeks in the intervention group when compared to the placebo group. These differences remained significant at 12 weeks. The Outcome Measures in Rheumatology Clinical Trials-Osteoarthritis Research Society International responder rate was 65% in the intervention group and 34% in the placebo group (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Low-dose oral prednisolone had both a short-term and a longer sustained effect resulting in less knee pain, better physical function, and attenuation of systemic inflammation in older patients with knee OA (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT01619163).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| 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".