Socio‐economic status and surgery in children: myringotomies and tonsillectomies in Ontario, Canada, 1996–2000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: To examine the relation between socio-economic status and (1) receipt of paediatric otolaryngological surgery, and (2) inclusion of adjuvant procedures. METHODS: Using data on myringotomies with insertion of tympanostomy tube and tonsillectomies for all children in Ontario, Canada, from 1996 to 2000, and census data on socio-economic status, we examined the association between socio-economic status and (1) the probability of surgery (myringotomy or tonsillectomy), and (2) the probability that surgery was accompanied by an adjuvant procedure. RESULTS: Lower socio-economic status was associated with increased likelihood that a child's initial surgery was a tonsillectomy rather than a myringotomy (odds ratio per unit increase in the deprivation index = 1.09, p = 0.01, confidence interval 1.06-1.11), and with increased likelihood that those children having a myringotomy would undergo a tonsillectomy during the same hospitalization (odds ratio 1.14, p < 0.0001, confidence interval 1.11-1.16). Children from neighbourhoods with larger immigrant populations were less likely to receive either procedure (odds ratios per 1% increase in the proportion of immigrants = 0.97 (p < 0.0001, confidence interval 0.96-0.97) for myringotomies and 0.97 (p < 0.0001, confidence interval 0.97-0.98) for tonsillectomies). CONCLUSIONS: Socio-economic status was associated with treatment selection for the two most common paediatric surgical procedures. Further research should examine whether differences in treatment arise at the level of the primary care physician, the specialist, and/or are due to parental preference.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".