Evaluating the effectiveness of valgus knee braces in improving pain, stiffness, and physical function in medial compartment osteoarthritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Valgus knee orthosis is a common conservative treatment for medial compartment knee osteoarthritis (OA), though its efficacy in diverse socioeconomic and cultural contexts remains understudied. This investigation evaluated the short-term effects of a valgus knee orthosis on knee OA patients from a developing country, while monitoring adherence, to address this gap in the literature. The study included 35 participants with radiographically confirmed OA (Kellgren-Lawrence grades 2-3). The Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis (WOMAC) index tool was used to assess participants. All participants utilized the Össur Unloader One orthosis, which was equipped with an integrated activPAL sensor to monitor adherence during a 2-week intervention period. WOMAC index demonstrated statistically significant improvement, with mean scores decreasing from 0.67 (0.15) to 0.42 (0.18) at 1 week ( P < 0.001) and to 0.32 (0.16) at 2 weeks ( P < 0.001) of wearing the orthosis. Notably, after 2 weeks, 86% of participants exceeded established minimal clinically important difference thresholds. ActivPAL data for adherence revealed a significant positive correlation between brace wearing time and clinical improvement ( P = 0.008), with participants achieving ≥8 h daily wear time exhibiting the best outcomes (51% improvement in WOMAC index). The findings shed light on the possible usefulness of valgus knee orthosis in controlling symptoms of knee OA patients from resource-variable settings with unique cultural habits (i.e. kneeling and floor-sitting behaviors) while highlighting the critical role of adherence monitoring.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".