LLD Gait Risk Explorer
Choose a leg-length discrepancy and a Wilson & Barstow gait pattern — then refine by sex, age, chronicity, side and LLD type — and see how musculoskeletal presentations in this cohort tilt for that profile. It opens on the question asked: a 6 mm short leg held in heel strike.
Where the whole population sits
All 506 records, before any filtering — sex, side, age and chronicity at a glance. In the passive assessment, grade A records which leg (if any) works optimally; grades B–D record which leg(s) are locked in a phase of gait.
Sex
Side — left · both · right
Age
Tissue profile — prevalence ratio vs the rest of the population in view
For each tissue type: how common it is in the selected group, relative to everyone else in the population your filters define. Right of the 1.0 line means over-represented; left means under-represented. Whiskers are 95% confidence intervals.
Body-site profile — where the presentations sit
The same comparison, by region of presentation.
Who sits in this group — sex, age, chronicity, LLD type, side
Person-level characteristics of the selected group against the rest — the "relative risk on these". A category you have filtered on will read as parity or empty, by construction.
Combination regions — what the presentation involves
Each free-text combination label has been coded to one or more controlled body regions (mapping supplied for review). A record counts once in every region it names, so shares can sum past 100%. Ratios compare the selected group with the rest of the population in view.
In combination with what — as recorded
The most common raw labels inside the selected group (gold bar = share of the group; blue mark = share of the rest), exactly as written in the records.
All 102 free-text labels feed the coded region panel above; the mapping is in the "Combination coding pass" spreadsheet — adjust it there and the coding can be re-run.
Where this gait pattern sits on the LLD scale
Share of each group at every discrepancy, with your selected band highlighted.
Condition lens — the LLD spread behind a presentation
Work the question the other way round: choose a tissue or a site and see the leg-length discrepancy and gait picture for everyone presenting with it, against the rest of the population in view. This lens ignores the gait & mm selection above; the population filters still apply.
Gait grades in this group — gold bar = condition group · blue mark = rest
Patterns worth noting in this data
Almost every discrepancy here is functional, not anatomical. Only 9 of 506 records carry a true (anatomical) LLD; 367 carry a functional one. Among people locked in heel-off or heel strike, 96–98% have a purely functional discrepancy — in this cohort, the locked phase of gait and the functional short leg are essentially the same finding seen two ways.
Symmetry and zero discrepancy travel together. Of the 136 people centred in midstance, only 13% carry any measured LLD (mean 0.9 mm). The asymmetric patterns are the mirror image: everyone locked in heel-off carries an LLD (mean 8.6 mm), as do 97% of those locked in heel strike (mean 9.1 mm).
Left and right are not symmetrical. Heel-off (long-side) patterns sit left 65% of the time, while heel-strike (short-side) patterns sit right 59% of the time — and the passively optimal leg is more often the right (55%). A right-short / left-long organisation is the cohort's dominant shape.
Sex is balanced in the main grades, but not at the edges. The cohort is 55% female, and grades A–D sit within a few points of that — except heel strike, which leans slightly male (48% F), and the two excluded "F" patterns, which are 80–82% female.
At ~6 mm in heel strike, load appears to stay low in the chain. The 24 people matching that profile tilt towards cartilage (ratio 1.7), knee (1.5), foot/ankle (1.7) and muscle presentations, while disc (0.5) and neural (0.4) presentations are under-represented. Every interval crosses 1.0, so these are directions of travel, not established effects.
This is a chronic, mid-life cohort. 94% of presentations are chronic (25 acute), and ages centre on 43 (IQR 35–50) — worth remembering before generalising to acute or older populations.
The body is not a collection of isolated parts — a few millimetres at the heel can show up as a pattern at the knee.
How to read this — honestly
This explorer summarises a single retrospective clinical cohort of 506 presentations. The ratios are prevalence ratios: they compare how common each characteristic is inside your selected group against the rest of the population your filters define. They describe association within these records — they do not establish cause, and they are not a prognosis for any individual.
Gait grades come from the Wilson & Barstow passive assessment of gait: grade A records which leg, if any, is working optimally; grades B, C and D record which leg or legs are locked in midstance, heel-off or heel strike; F marks excluded long/short patterns. A person can carry more than one grade. Combination labels were coded to twelve controlled body regions in a separate mapping (supplied alongside this page for review); a multi-region label counts in each region it names. The sex, age, chronicity, LLD-type and region filters narrow the whole population, so comparisons stay like-for-like; the "which leg" filter narrows only the selected gait group.
Small groups mean wide confidence intervals — single presentations move the ratios visibly, and the true-LLD group (n = 9) is too small for stable ratios at all. Where a category has no cases on either side, no ratio is drawn. Widening the mm band steadies the numbers; narrowing it sharpens the question.