Community‐based Case‐Control Study of Childhood Chronic Abdominal Pain: Role of Selected Laboratory Investigations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To compare laboratory investigation results in children with chronic abdominal pain and in healthy control children. Our hypothesis was that parasitic infection was not a causal factor for chronic abdominal pain and that there would be no difference in leukocyte count, hemoglobin level, or erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) between the 2 groups. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Children with chronic abdominal pain and healthy control children (5-15 years) were recruited from the practices of 6 primary care pediatricians in Toronto, Canada. Stool samples were analyzed for ova and parasites, and serum samples were used to estimate leukocyte count, hemoglobin, and ESR. A standardized questionnaire was used to gather social, demographic, and clinical information. RESULTS: A total of 157/200 children (79%) provided samples. Children with chronic abdominal pain were more likely to be female than were control children. Stool samples were positive for parasitic infection in 15 children, with no difference in prevalence between children with chronic abdominal pain (6/87; 7%) and healthy control children (9/70; 13%); P = 0.28). The mean (standard deviation) leukocyte count in children with chronic abdominal pain was 7.4 x 10(9)/L (2.03), compared with 8.3 x 10(9)/L (1.82) in healthy control children. No child had a leukocyte count above 20 x 10(9)/L. The mean (SD) hemoglobin in children with chronic abdominal pain was 131 g/L (8.4), compared with 130 g/L (9.2) in healthy control children. Last, the median ESR in children with chronic abdominal pain was 5 mm/hour, compared with 3 mm/hour in control children. CONCLUSIONS: The study findings suggest that in the absence of alarming symptoms and signs, parasitic infection is not a causal factor for chronic abdominal pain and that routine screening tests (leukocyte count, hemoglobin, ESR) are not useful.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".