The Effect of Intra-articular Hypertonic Dextrose Prolotherapy on Pain, Quality of Life, and Functional Outcomes Scores in Patients With Knee Osteoarthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Knee osteoarthritis is a common chronic condition leading to pain and debility. Prolotherapy is a safe and cost-effective treatment option. Our team conducted a case series to examine the effect of prolotherapy on functional measures and quality of life in patients with knee osteoarthritis. Methods Our case series included 15 total patients consisting of male and female patients aged 50-85 years old with a prior diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis and moderate pain. The patients completed baseline Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index (WOMAC) and EuroQol-5 Dimension (EQ5D) surveys and received an ultrasound-guided intra-articular prolotherapy injection. The patients were then followed up by Telehealth at one-, two-, and three-month post-procedure. Results Data points for 15 patients were recorded over the duration of the three months. Results revealed significantly improved functional scores from the baseline period (M = 0.60) to the one-month (M = 0.43), two-month (M = 0.48), and three-month (M = 0.46), observed power = 0.99. Participants reported significantly lower pain scores between the baseline period (M = 0.60) compared to the one-month (M = 0.34), two-month (M = 0.35) and three-month (M = 0.39) periods. There was no statistical significance across time in participants' EQ5D scores. The repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no statistically significant differences in participants scores between the baseline (M = 64.4), one-month (M = 68.93), two-month (M = 68.47), or three-month (M = 68.33), observed power = 0.31. There were no statistically significant differences in participants WOMAC stiffness scores between the baseline (M = 0.67), one-month (M = 0.46), two-month (M = 0.57), or three-month (M = 0.56) periods, observed power = 0.73. The results revealed no significant change in participants' EQ5D and WOMAC stiffness scores. The results support a statistically significant improvement in patients' self-reported functioning and pain scores between the baseline and one-month, two-month, and three-month periods. Discussion The significant improvement in function occurred between the baseline and one-month time periods and the pain reduction was sustained throughout the two-month and three-month periods. Our study supports prolotherapy as an effective treatment option to improve pain and function in knee osteoarthritis. The study could be repeated with a large sample size to further investigate the effects of prolotherapy on quality-of-life measures.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".