Single-Screw Fixation Compared With Double Screw Fixation for Treatment of Medial Malleolar Fractures: A Prospective Randomized Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To determine whether single or double screw (DS) fixation of medial malleolar fractures results in better long-term health outcomes. DESIGN: Randomized clinical trial; sealed envelope technique. SETTING: Level 1 Trauma Hospital at University of Calgary, Canada. PATIENTS: One hundred forty patients were randomized to receive either 1 or 2 screws to reduce a medial malleolar fracture. Thirteen patients were excluded because of loss to follow-up (n = 127). INTERVENTION: Surgical fixation of the medial malleolar fracture was performed using 1 or 2 stainless steel screws. MAIN OUTCOME MEASUREMENTS: Primary outcome was comparison of physical functioning summary score on Short Form 36 questionnaires between patients in the 2 groups. Secondary objectives were to compare the Ankle Hindfoot Scale and operating room time. Clinical and radiographic assessment occurred at the time of injury and 2, 6 weeks, 3, 6, 12, and 24 months postoperatively. RESULTS: Fourteen patients crossed over from the DS group to the single screw (SS) group based on intraoperative decisions by the surgeon (fragment too small for 2 screws), leaving the SS (n = 75) and DS groups (n = 52). There was no difference in the operating room time, SF36, or Ankle Hindfoot Scale at all follow-up time points. CONCLUSIONS: SS medial malleolar fixation provides an equally safe and effective method of fracture care as compared to DS fixation. Twenty percent of patients receiving 2 screws can be expected to crossover to receive SS fixation as a safer alternative. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Therapeutic Level I. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".