What happens to patients in the long term when we do not repair their cuff tears? Ten-year rotator cuff quality of life index (RC-QOL) outcomes following nonoperative treatment of patients with full-thickness rotator cuff tears
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The purpose of this study was to examine long-term, greater-than-ten-year outcomes of patients with full-thickness rotator cuff tears treated nonoperatively. Methods: Patients with a chronic, full-thickness rotator cuff tear (demonstrated on imaging) who were referred by their physician for shoulder surgery were enrolled in this prospective study between October 2008 and September 2010. Patients then participated in a comprehensive nonoperative treatment program. After the three-month program, patients were defined as "successful" or "failed." "Successful" patients were essentially asymptomatic and did not require surgery. "Failed" patients were symptomatic and consented to surgical repair. All patients were followed-up at 1 year, two years, and five years using a validated, disease-specific rotator cuff quality of life score (the RC-QOL) and whether or not they eventually underwent surgery during these time intervals. All of the patients who participated at the five-year follow-up were contacted for this study between 10 and 12 years (mean 11.4 years) after treatment. Results: = .27). Two patients had crossed over from the successful group to undergo surgery between 5 and 11 years (one had an acute traumatic injury and the other reported aggravation with activity). Conclusion: Nonoperative treatment is an effective and lasting option for many patients with a chronic, full-thickness rotator cuff tear. While some may argue that nonoperative treatment delays inevitable surgical repair, this long-term study shows that patients can do very well over time.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".