Medical exercise therapy alone versus arthroscopic partial meniscectomy followed by medical exercise therapy for degenerative meniscal tear: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To explore if medical exercise therapy (MET) alone is comparable to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy (APM) followed by MET for knee pain, activity level, and physical function in middle-aged patients with degenerative meniscal tear (DMT) by a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). METHOD: A systematic search of electronic databases (PubMed, the Cochrane Library, Embase, and Web of Science) was conducted to retrieve RCTs comparing MET+APM with MET alone for DMT. Risk of bias of the studies was evaluated. Outcomes assessed were pain relief, physical function, and activity level. RESULTS: A total of 6 RCTs containing 879 patients were included. After pooling the data of 5 researches, we found small significant differences support the APM + MET group for pain control assessed by Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS) at 2 to 3 months (p = 0.004) and at 6 months (p = 0.04). And there were statistically improvements in APM + MET at 6 months compared with MET alone when changing measurement to visual analog scale (VAS) (p = 0.0003). Our analysis also found small significant differences favor the APM followed by MET group for physical function both at 2 to 3 months (p = 0.01, KOOS and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index, WOMAC; and P = 0.40, Lysholm Knee Scoring Scale) and at 6 months (p = 0.01, KOOS and WOMAC). CONCLUSION: We found favorable results of APM + MET up to 6 months for pain control and physical function. However, there were no differences at longer follow-up. The clinical applicability of APM + MET compared with MET should be interpreted carefully, and the potential of MET to treat DMT should be valued.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.027 | 0.034 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".