Exploring the role of diet quality and adiposity in the pain experience: a mediation analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Improving diet quality may lower chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMP) directly or through weight loss. This study examined whether a dietary intervention for weight-loss improved diet quality and CMP in adults with elevated adiposity. It also investigated whether adiposity mediated a relationship between diet quality and pain. METHODS: ) who completed a 3-month dietary intervention targeting 30% energy restriction. Baseline and 3-month measures included diet quality (Dietary Guideline Index (DGI)), presence of CMP, pain related quality-of-life (Short-Form-36 bodily pain scale (SF36-BPS)), pain severity (McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ)) and adiposity (weight, waist circumference (WC), percent body fat (BF)). Linear mixed models estimated the effect of the dietary intervention on these outcomes. Structural equation modelling estimated the direct effects of changes in diet quality on CMP, and proportion mediated by changes in adiposity. RESULTS: Participants improved diet quality (DGI total score) by 22% (p < 0.001) and achieved weight loss (- 7.1 ± 0.3 kg, 95% CI - 7.7, - 6.4). Presence of CMP reduced from 50 to 24% (p < 0.001). Pain-related quality of life improved, and pain severity lessened. Reductions in weight, WC, or BF did not mediate improvements in pain characteristics. Improved diet quality (∆DGI) was directly associated with lower pain severity (∆MPQ), accounting for reductions in the mediator, WC (β = - 0.085, 95% CI - 0.151, - 0.019) and BF (β = - 0.073, 95% CI - 0.135, - 0.012). CONCLUSION: On average, diet quality improved and pain lessened following a 3-month dietary intervention for weight-loss. Changes in adiposity did not mediate this relationship.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".