Efficacy of Intra-Articular Hypertonic Dextrose (Prolotherapy) for Knee Osteoarthritis: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<h3>PURPOSE</h3> To test the efficacy of intra-articular hypertonic dextrose prolotherapy (DPT) vs normal saline (NS) injection for knee osteoarthritis (KOA). <h3>METHODS</h3> A single-center, parallel-group, blinded, randomized controlled trial was conducted at a university primary care clinic in Hong Kong. Patients with KOA (n = 76) were randomly allocated (1:1) to DPT or NS groups for injections at weeks 0, 4, 8, and 16. The primary outcome was the Western Ontario McMaster University Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC; 0-100 points) pain score. The secondary outcomes were the WOMAC composite, function and stiffness scores; objectively assessed physical function test results; visual analogue scale (VAS) for knee pain; and EuroQol-5D score. All outcomes were evaluated at baseline and at 16, 26, and 52 weeks using linear mixed model. <h3>RESULTS</h3> Randomization produced similar groups. The WOMAC pain score at 52 weeks showed a difference-in-difference estimate of −10.34 (95% CI, −19.20 to −1.49, <i>P</i> = 0.022) points. A similar favorable effect was shown on the difference-in-difference estimate on WOMAC function score of −9.55 (95% CI, −17.72 to −1.39, <i>P</i> = 0.022), WOMAC composite score of −9.65 (95% CI, −17.77 to −1.53, <i>P</i> = 0.020), VAS pain intensity score of −10.98 (95% CI, −21.36 to −0.61, <i>P</i> = 0.038), and EuroQol-5D VAS score of 8.64 (95% CI, 1.36 to 5.92, <i>P</i> = 0.020). No adverse events were reported. <h3>CONCLUSION</h3> Intra-articular dextrose prolotherapy injections reduced pain, improved function and quality of life in patients with KOA compared with blinded saline injections. The procedure is straightforward and safe; the adherence and satisfaction were high.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".