Pain During Office Removal of K-Wires From the Elbow in Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Closed reduction and K-wire fixation is standard treatment for displaced supracondylar fractures in children. The purpose of this study is to evaluate pain using 2 pediatric pain scales when removing K-wires from the distal humerus in children in the office setting. METHODS: A total of 98 percutaneous smooth K-wires were removed from 47 patients who had sustained displaced supracondylar fractures of the elbow. Pain was measured using the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Pain Scale (CHEOPS). The maximum score is 13 and the minimum score is 4 points. In addition, after K-wire removal, each child indicated on a numbered pain-face diagram (Wong-Baker FACES: a scale consisting of faces with varying emotional expressions and corresponding numbers on a scale from 0 to 5) the amount of pain that they felt. RESULTS: The average age of the patients treated was 7.1 years (range, 2 to 14 y). There were 28 males and 19 females. Thirty patients (64%) had a CHEOPS score of ≤6. The average CHEOPS was 6 (range, 4 to 10). Seventeen patients (37%) had a FACES score of ≤1. The average FACES score was 2 (range, 1 to 5). Higher CHEOPS and FACES scores correlated with younger patient age and higher number of K-wires removed. CONCLUSIONS: K-wire removal in the clinic is common practice. The pain associated with K-wire removal and the safety of this practice has received minimal previous study in the literature. In the present manuscript, 64% of patients had little or no pain measured by the CHEOPS scale--score of ≤6 and 36% had little or no pain self-reported by the FACES scale--score of ≤1. No patient reported severe pain by the CHEOPS scores (CHEOPS 11 to 13) and only 1 patient reported having severe pain with a FACES of 5. No complications occurred. The results of this study suggest that the removal of K-wires in the office setting is safe and acceptable. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Retrospective analysis.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".