Relationship Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Vulvodynia Pain Scores
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Introduction Vulvodynia is a chronic vulvar pain disorder that has a significant impact on physical and mental health. As with other chronic pain disorders, vulvodynia appears to have a link with childhood exposure to physical and sexual abuse and poor family support. Objective To assess the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and vulvodynia pain scores using the standardized McGill Pain Scale. Methods This study is a retrospective review of intake questionnaire data for patients presenting to a multispecialty vulvar diseases clinic. Demographic information, ACEs-related questions and McGill pain scale portions of the intake questionnaire were included. Exclusion criteria included age less than 18, cancer diagnosis, or presenting postoperatively in initial consultation. A control group was randomly selected using 2:1 age-matching from patients within our database without a coexisting diagnosis of vulvodynia. The primary outcome, McGill pain score, was calculated as the sum across all 20 pain elements. Group differences across demographic characteristics, ACE responses, and McGill scores were assessed using simple linear regressions for continuous measures, and logistic regressions for binary measures. Results A total of 1,245 patients, 415 vulvodynia and 830 age-matched controls were analyzed. Patients with vulvodynia differed significantly across self-reported race/ethnicity, marital status, and income level. Overall, patients with a diagnosis of vulvodynia had higher median McGill pain scores compared to controls (22.0 vs 20.0, p<0.001). Among patients with vulvodynia, patients who reported ACEs exposure had higher McGill pain scores compared to patients without disclosed ACEs exposure (26.0 vs 22.0, p<0.001). Similarly, among patients in the control group, patients who reported ACE exposure had higher McGill pain scores compared to those without (24.0 vs 17.0, p<0.001). Conclusions Our findings indicate a relationship between exposure to ACEs and increased pain in patients with vulvodynia and controls. These findings suggest exposure to ACEs alone may contribute to increased perception of pain and result in higher McGill Pain Scores. Disclosure No
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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".