Cervical Flexion Myelopathy After Valproic Acid Overdose
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STUDY DESIGN: Case report and literature review of cervical flexion myelopathies. OBJECTIVE: To increase awareness that prolonged extreme neck flexion, in association with profound muscular relaxation, can produce a severe cervical myelopathy. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Similar case reports of cervical myelopathies have been documented in the neurosurgical literature after intraoperative prolonged neck flexion, and after forcible prolonged neck flexion during a robbery. To the authors' best knowledge, this is the first report of a cervical flexion myelopathy after a medication overdose, and the only clinical-pathologic correlation. METHODS: Retrospective case report with clinical, radiographic, and postmortem data available for analysis. RESULTS: A transverse myelopathy at the sixth cervical level developed in a 25-year-old woman after an overdose of valproic acid in a suicide attempt. She was found in the sitting position, with her neck in extreme flexion, where she had been for an estimated 18 hours. Magnetic resonance imaging showed that her cervical cord was enlarged, maximally at C6, with prominent paraspinal soft tissue swelling. The patient died of pulmonary embolism and pneumonia. Pathologic findings included transverse spinal cord necrosis at C6; central gray matter necrosis extended to several segments below this. CONCLUSION: Prolonged extreme neck flexion, in association with profound muscular relaxation, can produce a severe myelopathy that is at least partly related to compromise of the spinal cord's microcirculation.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".