Vitamin C deficiency in a university teaching hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We measured plasma vitamin C concentrations in 149 patients admitted to a university teaching hospital. 60% of the patients had subnormal concentrations (< 28.4 μM). 19% had concentrations compatible with scurvy (< 11.4 μM), as compared with 3% of patients in a control group of presumably well‐nourished outpatients. Use of any vitamin supplement prior to hospitalization was associated with a normal vitamin C concentration in hospital (37 ± 4.3 μM); lack of such use was associated with a subnormal concentration (25 ± 1.5 μM; P = 0.0036). Thus, 36% of patients with a normal concentration had used a vitamin supplement prior to admission while only 7% of the frankly deficient patients had done so (P = 0.008). In a second sample, obtained in 48 patients after an average 16 days in hospital, the vitamin C concentration was lower (NS). Conclusions: Vitamin C status is inadequate in 60% of patients admitted to a university hospital and fails to improve there. Vitamin use prior to admission protects against subsequent deficiency in hospital. Vitamin C deficiencies as prevalent, severe, and sustained as observed in this study could worsen the clinical course of hospitalized patients. Supported by the Lotte and John Hecht Foundation and a Faculty of Medicine student research bursary.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".