Effects of a novel foot–ankle orthosis in the non-operative treatment of unicompartmental knee osteoarthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Unloader braces are non-surgical treatment options for patients with unicompartmental knee osteoarthritis (OA). However, many patients do not adhere to brace treatment because of complications related to discomfort and poor fit. An alternative to knee bracing is an ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) with a lever arm that presses the lower leg into valgus or varus. The aim of this study is to evaluate the clinical benefits of this AFO for patients with unicompartmental knee OA. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-three patients with knee OA were enrolled in this observational study. The primary clinical outcome measure was the Western Ontario and McMasters Universities Arthritis Index (WOMAC) total score. Secondary outcome measures included WOMAC subscores, visual analogue pain scale, activity restriction and complication rate. Clinical scores were collected at start and 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after enrollment. Statistical evaluation was performed using the Student's t test. RESULTS: Of the patients enrolled, 83 % suffered from medial compartment OA. Most patients had Grade II OA according to the Kellgren and Lawrence classification. WOMAC total score, both subscores and visual analogue pain scale were significantly improved over time. Patients also noted a reduction in restrictions to activities of daily living and sport-related activities while using the AFO. No patients discontinued orthosis use because of adverse effects. Two types of complications were noted: discomfort or light pressure sores around the ankle (7 patients), and wear and tear of the shoe in which the AFO was worn (14 patients). CONCLUSIONS: This observational study suggests that this AFO is effective at significantly reducing pain and stiffness as well as improving the physical function of patients with mild to moderate unicompartmental osteoarthritis of the knee.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".