The Epidemiology of Childhood Asthma in Red Deer and Medicine Hat, Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To document the prevalence of asthma among school-aged children in two Alberta communities, to understand host and indoor environmental factors associated with asthma, and to compare these factors between the two communities. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study with a nested, case-control follow-up. SETTING: Red Deer and Medicine Hat, Alberta. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Questionnaires were sent to families of children aged five to 19 years in Red Deer (n=5292) and Medicine Hat (n=5372) to identify children with current asthma. A random sample of 592 children with current asthma and 443 with no history of asthma constituted a case-control population; they were followed up by telephone to obtain responses to the European Respiratory Health Survey and, in children with current asthma, the Pediatric Quality of Life Questionnaire. RESULTS: Cross-sectional response rates were 84% and 73% for Red Deer and Medicine Hat, respectively. The prevalence of asthma was higher in Medicine Hat (17.0%) than in Red Deer (12.8%). In the follow-up study, factors associated with the presence of asthma were parental asthma or allergies, number of siblings, presence of cats, serious respiratory illnesses before five years of age, sex, age, presence of mould and/or mildew and use of a gas cooking stove. The presence of mould and/or mildew was a significant risk factor in Red Deer but not in Medicine Hat. CONCLUSIONS: Asthma prevalence among school children in Red Deer was consistent with recently published Canadian data; the prevalence in Medicine Hat was higher than expected, especially given the low relative humidity. Risk factor data are consistent with other studies in that parental asthma, especially maternal asthma, was a significant predictor of childhood asthma. Cats in the house (both communities) and environmental tobacco smoke (Medicine Hat only) were significantly less common among children with asthma, suggesting that preventive actions may have been taken in the homes of some children with asthma.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".