Prednisone for Acute Complex Regional Pain Syndrome: A Retrospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective. The objective of this study was to evaluate prednisone effectiveness on complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) features in a community-based outpatient rehabilitation setting. Design. A single-centre, retrospective inception cohort design was used. Inclusion criteria were CRPS diagnosis according to the Budapest criteria, involvement of multiple joints, treatment with prednisone, and duration of symptoms less than one year. Typical prednisone treatment was 28-day taper regimen with 60 mg. Patient symptoms and signs were compared before and after treatment. Results. There were 39 patients who met inclusion criteria for analysis. Duration of symptoms before treatment was 80.8 ± 67.7 days. Following treatment, 19 (48.7%) patients reported complete pain resolution, 19 (48.7%) patients reported decreased pain permitting functional use, and 1 (2.6%) patient reported no improvement. All symptoms and signs decreased significantly following oral prednisone treatment ( p<0.001 ). Range of motion (ROM) deficits persisted in 19 (49%) patients. However, 17 of these patients reported functional ROM recovery. Degree of ROM recovery and time-to-treatment had low positive correlation (r = 0.354, p<0.05 ). Logistic regression did not demonstrate associations among any patient factors and clinical outcomes. Conclusions. These data support short-course prednisone treatment for acute and subacute CRPS with multijoint involvement in a community rehabilitation setting. The association between time-to-treatment and ROM recovery suggests earlier treatment may result in improved ROM outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".