Surgical versus conservative treatment for lumbar disc herniation: a prospective cohort study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Evidence comparing the effectiveness of surgical and conservative treatment of symptomatic lumbar disc herniation is controversial. We sought to compare short-term and long-term effectiveness of surgical and conservative treatment in sciatica symptom severity and quality of life in patients with lumbar disc herniation in a routine clinical setting. METHODS: A prospective cohort study of a routine clinical practice registry consisting of 370 patients. Outcome measures were the North American Spine Society questionnaire and the 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey to assess patient-reported back pain, physical function, neurogenic symptoms and quality of life. Primary outcomes were back pain at 6 and 12 weeks. Standard open discectomy was assessed versus conservative interventions at 6, 12, 52 and 104 weeks. We filled in missing outcome variable values with multiple imputation, accounted for repeated measures within patients with mixed-effects models and adjusted baseline group differences in relevant prognostic indicators by inverse probability of treatment weighting. RESULTS: Surgical treatment patients reported less back pain at 6 weeks than those receiving conservative therapy (-0.97; 95% CI -1.89 to -0.09), were more likely to report ≥50% decrease in back pain symptoms from baseline to 6 weeks (48% vs 17%, risk difference: 0.34; 95% CI 0.16 to 0.47) and reported less physical function disability at 52 weeks (-3.7; 95% CI -7.4 to -0.1). The other assessments showed minimal between-group differences with CIs, including the null effect. CONCLUSIONS: Compared with conservative therapy, surgical treatment provided faster relief from back pain symptoms in patients with lumbar disc herniation, but did not show a benefit over conservative treatment in midterm and long-term follow-up.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 it