Is colectomy for fulminant <i>Clostridium difficile</i> colitis life saving? A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: It is unclear whether colectomy for fulminant Clostridium difficile colitis (FCDC) leads to a improvement in survival compared with continued medical therapy for this moribund population. METHOD: Selected studies from 1994-2010 were identified through a comprehensive search theme applied to MEDLINE (OvidSP and PubMed), EMBASE and by hand searching. Data regarding mortality rates between medically and surgically treated patients were extracted. Risk of bias was assessed using a Newcastle-Ottawa Scale score. A meta-analysis of the odds ratios for mortality between surgical and medical treatment for FCDC was conducted using the Mantel-Haenszel method and fixed-effects modelling. RESULTS: Five hundred and ten patients with FCDC were identified in six studies. The pooled adjusted odds ratio of mortality comparing surgery with medical therapy was 0.70 (0.49-0.99), suggesting that surgery provided a survival benefit. CONCLUSION: Emergent colectomy for patients with FCDC provides a survival advantage compared with continuing antibiotics. Though there is selection bias of patients having surgery, the results of this systematic review suggest that colectomy has a therapeutic role in treating severe forms of C. difficile colitis.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".