Effectiveness of High-intensity Laser Therapy for Pain and Function in Knee Osteoarthritis: A Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: High-intensity laser therapy (HILT) is still a controversial physical therapy modality for individuals with knee osteoarthritis (OA). Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the effect of HILT on pain and function in patients with knee OA. Methods: This randomized controlled trial included 56 patients with knee OA referred to Amin Hospital affiliated with Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran, from April 19 to August 30, 2022. Patients were randomized into two groups (HILT and control), receiving isometric exercises targeting the quadriceps muscle, meloxicam 15 mg tablet, and Rahamin ointment for two weeks. The HILT group also received high-intensity laser irradiation three times a week for two weeks. The primary outcome was pain assessed using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS), and the secondary outcome was the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis index (WOMAC) and its subscales (pain, stiffness, and physical function). Outcomes were evaluated at baseline, immediately, and three months after the last treatment session. Results: After adjusting for age, sex, and baseline values, immediately and three months after treatment, VAS pain scores were significantly lower in the HILT group than in controls (P < 0.001), with a large effect (standardized mean difference (SMD) = -1.22, 95% confidence interval (CI): -1.81; -0.62 and SMD = -1.31, 95% CI: -1.90; -0.70, respectively). The results were similar for WOMAC's pain subscale. Despite the difference in WOMAC stiffness score was not significant between the two groups immediately after treatment (P = 0.135), this score was significantly lower in the HILT group than in the control group (SMD = -0.98, 95% CI: -1.56; -0.40, P = 0.002) three months after treatment. Furthermore, WOMAC physical function scores were significantly lower with HILT immediately and three months after treatment (P < 0.001). The same was true for the total WOMAC score. Conclusions: High-intensity laser therapy significantly improved pain and the WOMAC score in patients with knee OA immediately and three months after the last treatment session compared to the control group.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".