Association Between Plasma Beta-endorphin and WOMAC Score in Female Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: β-endorphin plays a role in the descending pain control in the central nervous system. Central sensitization may be involved in the generating and maintenance of osteoarthritis (OA) pain. However, the correlation between β-endorphin and pain severity in OA has shown conflicting results. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between plasma β-endorphin and the severity of the disease. METHODS: This study was an observational cross-sectional study carried out on 60 female subjects with knee OA who fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Plasma β-endorphin was measured by a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit. Osteoarthritis knees were classified by the Kellegren-Lawrence (KL) grading (1-4) criteria. The Western Ontario McMaster University Osteoarthritis (WOMAC) scoring method was used to assess self-reported physical function, pain and stiffness. RESULTS: The mean of the participants' ages was 58 years old, ranging from 42 to 83 years. Overall, more than 70% of the participants were overweight with a mean of body mass index (BMI) of 27.59. More than 54% of the participants were diagnosed of having KL grading 3 or 4. Plasma β-endorphin was correlated inversely with the WOMAC subscale of stiffness (r=-0.286, p=0.0311), but no correlation was noted with the WOMAC subscale of pain and physical activity. There was no significant difference of the mean of plasma β-endorphin among the KL gradings. CONCLUSIONS: Plasma β-endorphin is associated with better WOMAC total score and stiffness subscale, but not associated with KL grading of OA. KEYWORDS: knee osteoarthritis, female, β-endorphin, WOMAC, Kellgren-Lawrence
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".