Prevalence of osteoarthritis-related imaging abnormalities in asymptomatic healthy adults

In the course of performing systematic reviews on the prevalence of low back and neck pain, we required a tool to assess the risk of study bias. Our objectives were to (1) modify an existing checklist and (2) test the final tool for interrater agreement. The final tool consists of 10 items addressing four domains of bias plus a summary risk of bias assessment. Two researchers tested the interrater agreement of the tool by independently assessing 54 randomly selected studies. Interrater agreement overall and for each individual item was assessed using the proportion of agreement and Kappa statistic. Raters found the tool easy to use, and there was high interrater agreement: overall agreement was 91% and the Kappa statistic was 0.82 (95% confidence interval: 0.76, 0.86). Agreement was almost perfect for the individual items on the tool and moderate for the summary assessment. We have addressed a research gap by modifying and testing a tool to assess risk of study bias. Further research may be useful for assessing the applicability of the tool across different conditions. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Show more

Imaging features of spine degeneration are common in symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. We compared the prevalence of MR imaging features of lumbar spine degeneration in adults 50 years of age and younger with and without self-reported low back pain.

Seventy-four shoulders in seventy patients with a history of single or multiple dislocations of the shoulder demonstrated radiographic evidence of glenohumeral arthropathy. In every patient radiographs of the contralateral shoulder failed to reveal any abnormality (except, of course, in patients with bilateral dislocation). There were sixty-two anterior and eleven posterior dislocations, and one multidirectional dislocation. Shoulders with a posterior dislocation had a much higher incidence of moderate and severe arthrosis than those that had an anterior dislocation. This seemed to be related to delay in diagnosis. The number of recurrent dislocations or the presence of defects of either the glenoid rim or the humeral head, or both, was not related to the severity of the arthrosis. Operations in which internal fixation devices intruded on joint cartilage frequently resulted in moderate to severe arthrosis. Ten of the fifteen shoulders with severe arthrosis and six of the fourteen with moderate arthrosis had had no operation for the dislocation. Six of these sixteen shoulders had had a posterior dislocation for which reduction had been delayed. Show more