Epidemiologic features of acute appendicitis in Ontario, Canada.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: To describe the epidemiology of acute appendicitis in the Province of Ontario, we carried out a retrospective population-based cohort study of all patients with acute appendicitis. METHODS: Using hospital discharge abstracts of patients with acute appendicitis from all acute care hospitals in Ontario for the fiscal years 1991-1998 coded for the Canadian Institute for Health Information, we studied the demographic features, particularly age and sex, length of hospital stay (LOS), incidence, and seasonal variation of acute appendicitis. RESULTS: During the observation period, 65,675 cases of acute appendicitis occurred in Ontario. Of these, 58% of the patients were male and 35.5% had perforation. The mean (and standard deviation [SD]) LOS for patients with perforation was 6.2 (5.3) days versus 3 (1.8) days for patients with no perforation (p < 0.001). The age-specific incidence of acute appendicitis followed a similar pattern for males and females, but males had higher rates in all age groups. The incidence was highest in those aged 10-19 years. The annual age and sex-adjusted incidence of acute appendicitis was 75 per 100,000 population. The female:male age-adjusted rate ratio was 1:1.4. During the study period, the rate of acute appendicitis decreased by 5.1%, but the rate of appendicitis with perforation increased by 13%. A significant seasonal effect was also observed, with the rate of acute appendicitis being higher in the summer months. CONCLUSIONS: Appendicitis is more common in males, in those aged 10-19 years, and during the summer months. The frequency of acute appendicitis appears to be decreasing whereas the proportion of cases with perforation appears to be increasing. This may reflect a change in the population structure in Ontario and restrictions placed on the patient access to the health care system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".