Practice of gastroenterologists in treating flaring inflammatory bowel disease patients with clostridium difficile
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The optimal management of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) in flaring inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients has not been defined. Limited data suggest that coadministration of immunomodulators (IM) with antibiotics (AB) results in a worse outcome. We investigated the prevalent practice among North American gastroenterologists in this scenario. METHODS: A structured questionnaire presented the clinical cases of two hospitalized patients with ulcerative colitis and concomitant CDI, either with or without prior IM treatment. The questionnaire was distributed to a sample of gastroenterologists at medical centers across North America. Respondents were requested to denote their therapeutic choices for these patients. RESULTS: The survey included 169 gastroenterologists, 122 from the US and 47 from Canada, with an average of 12 ± 10 years of experience in gastroenterology. Forty-two (25%) of the respondents were IBD experts. Seventy-seven (46%) respondents elected to add an IM in combination with AB, whereas 82/169 (54%) treated the flare with AB alone (P = NS). The rate of administering combined AB+IM was similar for the IBD experts and the non-IBD experts. Only 11% of respondents withdrew maintenance azathioprine upon the diagnosis of CDI. More IBD experts stopped azathioprine treatment compared to the non-IBD experts (12/42 versus 6/127, P < 0.001). Overall, 65% of surveyed gastroenterologists stated they believe these patients are afflicted by two simultaneous but separate disease processes. CONCLUSIONS: There is significant disagreement among gastroenterologists on whether combination AB+IM or AB alone should be given to IBD patients with CDI-associated flares. Controlled trials are needed to investigate the optimal management approach to this clinical dilemma.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".