Does a Prolonged Sham Theta Burst Stimulation Intervention Regimen Outperform Standard Care in Terms of Functional Recovery and Pain Relief After an Upper Limb Fracture?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: In a recent sham-controlled 13-session prolonged continuous theta burst stimulation intervention protocol, recovery from upper limb fracture at both 1 and 3 months was better than anticipated in patients assigned to the sham intervention group. To determine whether potential placebo effect and close patient monitoring affected recovery, the current study aimed to compare clinical outcomes between sham-treated participants who also received standard care with similarly injured patients who only received standard care. METHODS: Twenty participants with isolated upper limb fractures from the sham group were seen 13 times post-fracture (1 baseline session, 10 treatments, and 2 follow-ups [1 and 3 months]) over 3 months. They completed the self-reported Disabilities of Arm, Shoulder, and Hand (DASH) questionnaire and the Numerical Rating Scale for pain assessment at 1 and 3 months post-fracture. Two control groups were recruited: 43 participants at 1 month post-fracture and another 40 participants at 3 months post-fracture. These control groups completed the same questionnaires online, without any lab visits. RESULTS: At 1 month, patients from the sham group reported significantly less functional impairments on the DASH (p = .010). At 3 months, significantly more patients from the control group reported functional limitations (72.5% versus sham's 40%, p = .015). CONCLUSIONS: Although preliminary, these findings suggest clinically significant beneficial effects of the sham intervention over the standard care groups. This positive sham intervention effect may be attributed to a placebo response that includes the placebo effect associated with sham rTMS, but also the impact of various factors such as the close monitoring of the injury.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".