Evidence-based medicine and the role of antioxidants in physically stressed people
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Proponents of evidence-based medicine emphasize that conclusions regarding the effects of interventions should be based on systematic reviews of the literature and should focus on clinically relevant outcomes.1 Neither of these demands was fulfilled in Nieman's recent discussion of the effects of antioxidants on respiratory infections in physically stressed people.2 We carried out a systematic review of the effect of vitamin C supplementation on the common cold and identified six controlled trials with participants under heavy acute physical stress.3 Four of these were with marathon runners (three in South Africa4–6 and one in the USA7), one was with schoolchildren in a skiing camp in the Swiss Alps,8 and one was with Canadian soldiers in a northern training exercise.9 We pooled the results of these six trials and found that vitamin C supplementation reduced the incidence of common cold on average by 50% (95% confidence interval [CI]: −62% to −34%). In contrast, vitamin C had no effect on common cold incidence in the general population.3 Nieman writes just two sentences about the trials testing the effect of antioxidants on clinical infection outcomes: “Several double-blind placebo studies of South African ultramarathon runners demonstrated that vitamin C (but not E or beta-carotene) supplementation (about 600 mg/day for 3 weeks) was related to fewer reports of upper respiratory tract infection symptoms (3 references). This finding, however, was not replicated by other research teams, even when 1 g of vitamin C was consumed for 2 months prior to a marathon (1 reference)”. 2, (p. 313) The references in these two sentences are erroneus. Of the first three references, …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".