A Rare Cause of Epistaxis, Hemoptysis and Anemia: Leech in the Nasopharynx
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leeches are blood-sucking endoparasites that can be seen in different colors and sizes. Leech infestation is endemic in tropical regions like Mediterranean countries, Africa and Asia. Leeches enter the human body when the polluted water is drunk, and they localize in the mucosa of the oropharynx, nasopharynx, tonsils, esophagus or nose but rarely in larynx. Depending on its localisation in the body, the leech which attaches firmly on the mucosa secretes an anticoagulant substance called hirudin and may cause different clinical symptoms such as epistaxis, hemoptysis or hematemesis. A dark colored and moving foreign body in nasopharynx was observed in the endoscopic examination of three cases of 12 to 70 years of age who were applied to our emergency department with complaints of epistaxis, nasal obstruction and hemoptysis lasting for about a month. All three cases were from rural areas and used well water as drinking water . They were treated by immediate removal of the foreign body using forceps, and it was detected to be a species of leech. Following this procedure, all three cases recovered uneventfully. Although leeches are rarely observed in the respiratory system, it may occasionally cause life-threatening complications if it is not accurately diagnosed. Therefore, leech infestation should be considered as a cause of unexplained hemoptysis, epistaxis or anemia in leech-endemic areas. A definitive diagnosis can be made by endoscopic assessment. doi:10.4021/jmc41e
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".