Benefits observed in an inpatient MDT programme for FND are not associated with medication use or previous therapies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aims The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery provides various services for patients with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), including a four-week inpatient rehabilitation programme run by an integrated Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) of Occupational Therapists (OT), Physiotherapists (PT), Psychologists and Psychiatrists. We had observed that patients with FND often have medical and psychiatric comorbidities including affective, dissociative, somatic symptom and pain disorders; pharmacological treatments are commonly used. We hypothesised that a high burden of medication, particularly of those which produce dependence, might limit one's ability to entrain therapeutic strategies and therefore benefit from treatment. We additionally hypothesised that patients who had previously tried individual physical or psychological therapies might gain less than those who were treatment-naïve. Method In this service evaluation project, we reviewed records from 97 consecutive elective inpatient admissions, comprising the entire intake for 2019 and 2020. Data were extracted from the inpatient discharge summary and therapies discharge report of each patient. We recorded which therapies for FND patients had previously tried (OT; PT; Speech and Language Therapy; Psychology; Pain Service) and the classes of medications they were taking on admission (opiates; benzodiazepines; antidepressants; mood stabilisers; antipsychotics; gabapentinoids). We compared the differentials in outcome measures recorded on the first and last day, including the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (n = 79) and EQ-5D-5L (n = 79). Statistical tests of effect size and significance were done using SPSS-25. Group comparisons of EQ-5D-5L were made with Paired t-tests; all other comparisons were done with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests due to non-normal data. Result The most common medications used were antidepressants (72%), gabapentinoids (39%), opiates (36%) and benzodiazepines (25%). 69% of patients had tried PT, 57% psychology and 52% OT, while only 13% were treatment naïve. Whole-cohort analysis revealed highly significant improvements (p < 0.001) in occupational performance, satisfaction, ratings of general health, subjective difficulty in performing tasks and in pain and fatigue levels. We found no significant differences in outcome measures that correlated with past therapies or medication use. Conclusion Our analysis shows that the great majority of our patients gained meaningful benefits from their admission, both on clinician-rated metrics of occupational performance and patient-rated measures of subjective improvement. That there was no significant relationship with therapies or medications suggests, promisingly, that patients taking various medications and with suboptimal responses to previous therapy can still benefit from our MDT programme. Limitations include correlational design, limited generalisability to the general population, missing data for certain outcome measures and the absence of follow-up data.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".