Changing prescription patterns for lithium and valproic acid in old age: shifting practice without evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, valproic acid (prescribed as divalproex in North America) has been marketed as an alternative to lithium for treating bipolar disorders. For elderly patients, however, there is no clear evidence that valproic acid is more beneficial than lithium. Moreover, the evidence for the superiority of valproic acid in treating bipolar disorders—mixed episodes and rapid cycling—has been challenged in a recent Cochrane review.1 Valproic acid has not benefited patients with manic and psychiatric symptoms in dementia, despite the growing use of the drug in the management of these conditions.2 Recently, the relatively rapid shift in prescription patterns has been questioned.3 We describe trends in the use of lithium and valproic acid in a large population of people over 65. We obtained information on drug use from the Ontario Drug Benefit Program, which provides comprehensive drug benefits to all residents aged 65 or older in Ontario, Canada. …
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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 | 0.015 | 0.069 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".