Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Trachoma is the world's leading cause of preventable blindness. In 1997 the World Health Organization launched an initiative on trachoma control based on the 'SAFE' strategy (surgery, antibiotics, facial cleanliness and environmental improvement). OBJECTIVES: To assess the evidence supporting the antibiotic arm of the SAFE strategy by assessing the effects of antibiotics on both active trachoma (primary objective) and on Chlamydia trachomatis infection of the conjunctiva (secondary objective). SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials - CENTRAL (which contains the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group Trials Register) (The Cochrane Library Issue 1, 2005), MEDLINE (1966 to February 2005), and EMBASE (1980 to February 2005). We used the Science Citation Index to look for articles that cited the included studies. We searched the reference lists of identified articles and we contacted authors and experts for details of further relevant studies. SELECTION CRITERIA: We included only randomised trials that satisfied either of two criteria: (a) trials in which topical or oral administration of an antibiotic was compared to placebo or no treatment in people with trachoma, (b) trials in which a topical antibiotic was compared with an oral antibiotic in people with trachoma. A subdivision of particular interest was of trials in which topical tetracycline/chlortetracycline was compared with oral azithromycin, as these are the two World Health Organization recommended treatments. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two authors independently assessed trial quality and extracted data. We contacted investigators for missing data. MAIN RESULTS: We found 15 studies that randomised a total of 8678 participants. For both outcomes (active trachoma and laboratory evidence of infection) the results of the chi squared tests suggested that there was significant statistical heterogeneity among the trials. There was also marked clinical heterogeneity. No summary statistics were calculated and we therefore present a narrative summary of the results. For the comparisons of oral or topical antibiotic against placebo/no treatment, the data are consistent with there being no effect of antibiotics but are suggestive of a lowering of the point prevalence of relative risk of both active disease and laboratory evidence of infection at three and 12 months after treatment. For the comparison of oral against topical antibiotics the results suggest that oral treatment is neither more nor less effective than topical treatment. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: There is some evidence that antibiotics reduce active trachoma but results are not consistent and cannot be pooled.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.040 | 0.007 |
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".