Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation as an adjunct to quadriceps strengthening exercise in knee osteoarthritis: a pilot randomised controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine the feasibility, safety and perceived patient response of a combined repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and quadriceps strengthening exercise intervention for knee osteoarthritis. METHODS: A two-arm, participant-blinded, therapist-blinded and assessor-blinded, randomised controlled trial with additional follow-up of pain and function at 3 months. Participants were randomised to receive active rTMS+exercise (AR+EX) or sham rTMS+exercise (SR+EX) twice weekly for 6 weeks while completing home exercises twice a week. Primary outcomes included recruitment rate, treatment attendance, dropouts, willingness to undergo therapy (11-point Numeric Rating Scale, 'not at all willing'=0 and 'very willing'=10), success of participant, therapist and outcome assessor blinding, adverse events and Global Perceived Effect Scale. Secondary outcomes were pain, function and measures of physiological mechanisms. RESULTS: 86 people were screened, 31 (36%) were randomised, 28 (90%) completed the treatments and 3 (10%) dropouts at 3-month follow-up. Both groups had high treatment attendance (98.4% and 100%). All participants scored at least 7 on the willingness to undergo therapy scale. Blinding was successful. No adverse events were reported. At the postintervention assessment, 80% in the AR+EX group and 75% in the SR+EX group reported an improvement on the Global Perceived Effect Scale. Both groups demonstrated within-group improvements in pain at the postintervention assessment but not at the 3-month follow-up. Function improved only in the AR+EX group at the postintervention assessment. CONCLUSIONS: Combined rTMS and quadriceps strengthening exercise intervention for knee osteoarthritis is feasible, safe and well-received. A full-scale trial is justified to assess the clinical benefits of this novel treatment. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: ACTRN12621001712897.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".