Overdiagnosis of Asthma in the Community
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Overdiagnosis of asthma may be an emerging problem after years of attention to the rising prevalence and reported underdiagnosis of the disease. OBJECTIVES: A sample of adult asthmatics from the community was investigated to determine whether they met the current diagnostic criteria for asthma. METHODS: Ninety participants were studied from a self-referred sample of physician-labelled, adult asthmatics from the community. The setting was a tertiary care, university-affiliated teaching hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Three diagnostic criteria from the Canadian Thoracic Society Asthma Guidelines were used to demonstrate the presence of asthma: first, positive symptom history, and either, second, reversible airflow obstruction demonstrable on spirometry or documented peak expiratory flow rate diurnal variability, or, third, bronchial hyperreactivity to methacholine. RESULTS: At the time of the study, 41% of a sample of physician-labelled asthmatics showed no evidence of reversible airflow obstruction and had a negative methacholine challenge. By backward logistical regression analysis, a higher mean number of medications used (P<0.01), a lower forced expiratory volume in 1 s (P<0.05) and using inhaled steroids (P<0.05) were predictive of meeting the diagnostic criteria for asthma. Sixty-two per cent of subjects who did not meet the criteria for asthma were currently taking medications for "asthma". Only 52.2% of the subjects reported ever having undergone pulmonary function testing. CONCLUSIONS: Overdiagnosis of asthma is a potential problem, which may result in unnecessary or inappropriate medication use, increased health care costs and mislabelling of patients. The authors recommend greater use of objective diagnostic tests such as spirometry, peak flow diaries and bronchial provocation to establish a clinical diagnosis of asthma.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it