Diagnosis of Constipation in Family Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Patients who complain of constipation to their family doctor may not be truly constipated. Variability in stool frequency and consistency, and perception of symptoms may lead to inaccurate patient reporting or diagnosis of constipation. OBJECTIVES: To determine whether patients visiting their family doctor with a complaint of, or diagnosed with, constipation fulfilled the Rome II criteria for functional constipation and had stool characteristics of constipation. METHODS: A random sample of Canadian family physicians were recruited to enroll a series of adults who complained of, or had received a diagnosis of, constipation during an office visit. Patients were advised of the survey. Those providing written consent were contacted by an independent research firm and forwarded a survey questionnaire that included the Rome II gastrointestinal questionnaire, questions regarding their medical history and questions regarding their demographics. Patients also completed a four-week daily diary recording their bowel habits using the Bristol Stool Form Scale, medication use and satisfaction with treatment. Questionnaire and diary responses were retrieved by telephone. RESULTS: One hundred eighty-four family physicians enrolled 311 patients, of whom 220 completed the questionnaire. Females comprised 79.5% of the sample and had a mean age of 54.2 years (males 61.6 years; P<0.05). According to the Rome II criteria, 37.3% had functional constipation and 46.8% had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Whole gut transit times estimated using the Bristol Stool Scale were similar among those with self-reported constipation, those with Rome II functional constipation and those with Rome II IBS (79.3 h, 85.8 h and 77.4 h, respectively). Almost half of the patients with IBS or functional constipation were taking a pain medication, while nearly one-fifth took antidepressants. Of the medications or remedies taken to treat constipation, patients rated 49.8% of the doses as satisfactory. CONCLUSIONS: A large proportion of Canadian primary care patients whose presenting complaint or diagnosis was constipation satisfied the Rome II criteria for IBS, with a smaller number defined as functionally constipated. IBS patients tended to be younger than those with functional constipation, and whole gut transit times did not differentiate IBS from functional constipation. Careful questioning of patients who complain of constipation may reveal constipating medication, diarrhea symptoms or IBS.
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.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.007 | 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".