Peripheral Nerve Blockade for Primary Total Knee Arthroplasty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although peripheral nerve blocks decrease pain after total knee arthroplasty, the population-level impact of nerve blocks on arthroplasty resource utilization is unknown. METHODS: We conducted a population-based cohort study using linked administrative data from Ontario, Canada. We identified all adults having their first primary knee arthroplasty between 2002 and 2013. Using propensity scores to adjust for measureable confounders, we matched nerve block patients to a patient who did not receive a block. Within the matched cohort, we estimated the independent association of blocks with outcomes (length of hospital stay [primary]; and readmissions, emergency department visits, and falls [secondary]). RESULTS: One hundred seventy-eight thousand two hundred fourteen patients were identified; 61,588 (34.6%) had a block. The mean hospital stay was 4.6 days with a block compared to 4.8 without. After matching, there was a statistically significant decrease in the length of stay in the block group (relative risk, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.97 to 0.99; P < 0.001). Blocks were associated with a significant decrease in readmissions (relative risk, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.88; P < 0.001) but not emergency department visits (relative risk, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.98 to 1.05) or falls (relative risk, 1.37; 95% CI, 0.90 to 2.08). The association of blocks with length of stay after 2008 was inconsistent; overall, they were associated with longer stays; however, single-shot blocks were associated with shorter stays, while continuous techniques prolonged the length of stay. CONCLUSIONS: Nerve blocks in total knee arthroplasty patients were associated with statistically significant reductions in length of stay and readmissions, but not emergency department visits or falls. The significance of these findings at the patient level and in contemporary practice requires further exploration in prospective randomized studies at low risk of indication bias.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".