Intra-articular corticosteroid knee injection induces a reduction in meniscal thickness with no treatment effect on cartilage volume: a case–control study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although intra-articular corticosteroid injections (IACI) are commonly used for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis (OA), there is controversy regarding possible deleterious effects on joint structure. In this line, this study investigates the effects of IACI on the evolution of knee OA structural changes and pain. Participants for this nested case-control study were from the Osteoarthritis Initiative. Knees of participants who had received an IACI and had magnetic resonance images (MRI) were named cases (n = 93), and each matched with one control (n = 93). Features assessed at the yearly visits and their changes within the follow-up period were from MRI (cartilage volume, meniscal thickness, bone marrow lesions, bone curvature, and synovial effusion size), X-ray (joint space width), and clinical (Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index [WOMAC] pain score) data. Participants who received IACI experienced a transient and significantly greater rate of loss of the meniscal thickness (p = 0.006) and joint space width (p = 0.011) in the knee medial compartment in the year they received the injection, compared to controls. No significant effect of the IACI was found on the rate of cartilage loss nor on any other knee structural changes or WOMAC pain post-treatment. In conclusion, a single IACI in knee OA was shown to be safe with no negative impact on structural changes, but there was a transient meniscal thickness reduction, a phenomenon for which the clinical relevance is at present unknown.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".