Bilirubin as a Protective Factor for Rheumatoid Arthritis: An NHANES Study of 2003 - 2006 Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Rheumatoid arthritis(RA) is a chronic inflammatory, autoimmune polyarthritis, with a prevalence estimated at one percent of the United States(US) population. Serum bilirubin, because of its antioxidant nature, has been conjectured to exert an anti-inflammatory biologic effect. The objective of this study is to discern whether higher serum Total Bilirubin(TBili) levels are protective against RA. METHODS: This is a secondary analysis of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data collected between 2003-2006. Study participants completed a comprehensive questionnaire regarding their health history, underwent a physical examination, and had body fluids collected for laboratory studies. In NHANES, to assess for the presence of RA, the following questions were asked: Doctor ever said you had arthritis?" If so, Which type of arthritis. Statistical analysis was performed, using SAS version 9.1, proc survey methods. Participant data were adjusted for demographic characteristics as well as risk factors for RA. RESULTS: NHANES 2003-2006 included 20,470 individuals, chosen as a representative sampling of the entire US population. Exclusion criteria included age less than twenty years or liver dysfunction, defined as history of abnormal liver function tests or liver disease. 8,147 subjects did not have any exclusion criteria and were included in the data analysis. RA is inversely related to the serum level of TBili with an odds ratio of 0.679 (95% CI 0.533-0.865) and remained significant even after adjusting for age, gender, race, education, and tobacco history, with an odds ratio 0.749 (95% CI 0.575 - 0.976). CONCLUSIONS: Our study supports the hypothesis that higher TBili levels are protective against RA. A plausible mechanism for this association would be that the anti-oxidant effects of TBili exert a physiologic anti-inflammatory effect, which provides protection against RA. This explanation is supported by prior studies which show that higher TBili levels are protective against stroke, atherosclerosis, and vasculitis. Further studies are needed to delineate the exact nature of the protective properties of TBili. KEYWORDS: Bilirubin; Rheumatoid arthritis; Antioxidant; Protective.
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 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 | 0.010 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".