Knee function, pain and magnetic resonance imaging abnormalities in Australian Rules Football players: a cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Australian Rules Football (ARF) has a strong following in Australia and has one of the highest injury rates amongst collision sports worldwide.1 Knee injuries are common in ARF and are associated with both short- and long-term functional disability.1,2 Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revolutionised our understanding of knee pathology, with early detection of knee abnormalities that eventually lead to significant disability.3 This is the first study to determine the prevalence of MRI assessed knee abnormalities in ARF players and describe their associations with function, pain, past and incident injury and surgery history. 58 of 75 male players (aged 16–30 years) from the Tasmanian State Football League underwent MRI of both knees early in the season, assessing cartilage defects, bone marrow lesions (BMLs), meniscal tears/extrusion and effusion. History of knee injury and surgery, and knee pain and function (VAS and KOOS) and incident knee injuries were assessed. Measures were repeated at the end of the season (3–5 months later). MRI knee abnormalities were common at baseline (67% BMLs, 16% meniscal tear/extrusion, 43% cartilage defects, 67% effusion-synovitis). At baseline, presence of BMLs was associated with higher knee pain and dysfunction (VAS 3 vs 17, P < 0.01; KOOS 6 vs 18, P = 0.03) in the right but not left knee, and higher prevalence of previous knee injury and surgery (21% vs 53%, P = 0.01; 0% vs 18%, P = 0.03 respectively). Findings were similar for meniscal tears/extrusion. Previous injury and previous surgery were more common in those with an effusion and with cartilage defects respectively. Incident knee injuries were associated with worsening knee pain and function (VAS −6 vs 27, P < 0.01; KOOS −5 vs 21, P < 0.01), presence of new or enlarging BMLs (22% vs 67%, P < 0.01) and incident cartilage defects (3% vs 17%, P = 0.03). Interestingly, knee abnormalities were also common in asymptomatic players with no prior history of injury or surgery (5–59%). As far as we are aware, this is the first study to examine the clinical significance of MRI abnormalities in AFL players. Structural abnormalities commonly seen in osteoarthritis are also common in sub-elite ARF players. Their associations with injury and surgery suggest they could be clinically important; however, the implication for long-term knee health is unknown especially in asymptomatic players.
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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".