Opening Pandora's box: parental anxiety and the assessment of childhood murmurs.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Most family physicians and pediatricians recognize the induction of parental anxiety when a newly diagnosed childhood murmur is discussed with a child's parent. OBJECTIVES: To assess parental anxiety before and after consultation with a pediatric cardiologist for assessment of a childhood murmur. The study investigated the relationship between anxiety and parental understanding of murmurs, and assessed the possible role of the primary physician's initial diagnosis of the child's murmur on the anxiety level of parents. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: One hundred ninety-five consecutive parents who presented with their child to the Alberta Children's Hospital Cardiology Clinic, Calgary, Alberta, were recruited. The children were referred for an initial consultation with a pediatric cardiologist for assessment of a heart murmur noted previously by the referring physicians. Before consultation, the patients were divided into three murmur groups for diagnosis: innocent, pathological and unknown. Anxiety questionnaires, as well as questionnaires assessing basic parent understanding of childhood murmurs, were administered to one of the parents pre- and postconsultation. RESULTS: The initial diagnosis given to the caregiver by the primary care physician as the reason for referral did not seem to affect the level of parental anxiety within groups. As expected, postconsultation anxiety levels were significantly higher in parents whose children received a pathological diagnosis from the pediatric cardiologist. A significant drop in parental anxiety post-consultation was seen in all parent groups, including parents of a child diagnosed with a significant cardiac problem or pathology requiring further investigation and/or cardiac follow-up. There was a consistent correlation between higher scores on parental understanding and lower levels of parental anxiety. CONCLUSION: The present study confirms that the finding of a childhood murmur by the family doctor or pediatrician induces significant parental anxiety, even when the presumptive diagnosis is that of an 'innocent' murmur. Pediatric cardiology consultation decreases parental anxiety, even in parents whose child has been given a diagnosis of pathology. The correlation between poor understanding of murmurs and high parental anxiety suggests that further study is required on the role of the referring physician in augmenting parental understanding of the term 'heart murmur' and the referral process.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".