Self-reported health outcomes and medical complications at 6- and 8-year follow-up after direct skeletal fixation in individuals with bilateral transfemoral amputations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Direct skeletal fixation (DSF) involves attaching the intramedullary portion of a prosthesis directly to the skeletal residuum, providing an alternative for amputees unable to mobilise with socket-based prostheses. This study investigates the effects of DSF on physical and mental health at 6- and 8-year follow-up for military bilateral transfemoral amputees in the UK. Eight male bilateral transfemoral military amputees who underwent implantation with the Osseointegration Group of Australia-Osseointegration Prosthetic Limb prosthesis consented to participate in the study. All patients are routinely reviewed annually in a dedicated clinic, and this paper reports the 6- and 8-year follow-ups. Patient-reported outcomes were assessed using the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36). Complications data were recorded at the 8-year follow-up. The SF-36 physical component score significantly increased from preoperative levels at 6 years (median: 29 vs. 47; P = 0.003) and 8 years (median: 29 vs. 45; P = 0.024). The SF-36 mental health component score improved significantly at 6 years from preop (median: 39 vs. 57; P = 0.011). Among 16 femoral residuums, there was one explantation because of infection at 8.5 years postimplantation, and two cases were managed with long-term suppressive antibiotics. A total of 17 additional procedures were performed on nine residuums: 11 for soft tissue revision, five for infection, and one for fracture repair. This research adds to the growing evidence base that DSF has the potential to enhance the health and well-being of amputee veterans and potentially the broader amputee population. Medical complications remain an important consideration.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".