Pain sensitisation and joint inflammation in patients with active rheumatoid arthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Despite better therapies and strategies, many people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have persistent pain, often from abnormal pain processing, now termed nociplastic pain. However, RA patients with fibromyalgia (FM), a central nociplastic pain syndrome, also have power doppler ultrasound (PDUS+) joint inflammation. To understand the complex causes of pain, we performed clinical examination and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) plus comprehensive PDUS evaluation not previously combined. METHODS: In a cross-sectional study of sequential RA patients with at least moderate DAS28 erythrocyte sedimentation rate disease activity, we assessed 66/68 joints for swelling and tenderness, respectively, FM American College of Rheumatology 2010 diagnostic criteria, completed PROMs for function, quality of life and mood, alongside PDUS examination of 44 joints. Statistical analysis included logistic regression modelling and regularised (lasso) logistic regression methods. RESULTS: From 158 patients, 72 (46%) patients met FM criteria, with significantly worse tender joint counts and PROMs, but no differences in PDUS compared with the non-FM group. Categorising patients by PDUS+ joint presence and/or FM criteria, we identified four distinct groups: 43 (27.2%) patients with -FM-PD, 43 (27.2%) with -FM+PD, 42 (26.6%) with +FM-PD and 30 (19%) with +FM+PD. Both FM+ groups had worse PROMs for fatigue, mood and pain, compared with the FM- groups. We were unable to develop algorithms to identify different groups. CONCLUSION: The unexpected group -FM-PD group may have peripheral nociplastic pain, not commonly recognised in rheumatology. Only 46% of patients demonstrated PDUS+ inflammation. However clinical examination and PROMs did not reliably differentiate groups, emphasising PDUS remains an important tool.
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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".