Is nervus femoralis radiofrequency ablation an effective treatment for recalcitrant greater trochanteric pain syndrome? Results of a cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To describe long-term treatment outcomes of nervus femoralis radiofrequency ablation (NF-RFA) for recalcitrant greater trochanteric pain syndrome (GTPS). DESIGN: A cross-sectional study. METHODS: Chart review of consecutive patients who underwent NF-RFA from 2022 to 2023 was performed. A standardized telephone survey was utilized to capture current Numeric Pain Rating Scale (NPRS) and Patient Global Impression of Change (PGIC) scores. The primary outcome was ≥50% NPRS score reduction at follow-up. A secondary analysis was completed on free text responses asking patients to describe post-procedural changes in pain and function in their own words. RESULTS: Outcomes were collected from 25 patients (aged 71.7 ± 9.3 years; 80.0% female; body mass index 29.3 ± 6.8 kg/m2) for 27 NF-RFA procedures at a minimum follow-up time of 6 months post-procedure. Average follow-up time was 13.1 ± 4.9 months; ≥50% NPRS reduction from baseline was reported by 55.6% (n = 15/27; 95% CI, 37.3-72.4) of patients. In addition, ≥ 2-point NPRS score reduction from baseline was reported by 70.4% (n = 19/27; 95% CI, 51.5-84.2) of patients, and 51.9% (n = 14/27; 95% CI, 34.0-69.3) reported a PGIC score consistent with "much improved" or "very much improved." CONCLUSION: In this cohort, over 55% of patients who received NF-RFA as treatment for refractory GTPS reported at least 50% improvement in hip pain at an average follow-up of approximately 13 months. The majority of free text responses from patients indicated that they would recommend NF-RFA, while approximately 25% reported ongoing pain and disability from low back pain or a return of index hip pain symptoms post-procedure.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".