Dexamethasone for the Treatment of Sore Throat in Children With Suspected Infectious Mononucleosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the efficacy of a single oral dose of dexamethasone for pain relief in acute exudative pharyngitis associated with infectious mononucleosis. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pediatric emergency department-based clinical trial. Patients aged between 8 and 18 years with a sore throat from clinically suspected infectious mononucleosis were eligible. Patients were randomized to receive either an oral dose of 0.3 mg/kg (maximum, 15 mg) of dexamethasone or a placebo. Patients completed a diary of symptoms and rated their pain on a visual analog scale from 0 to 100 mm at 0 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, and on day 7. An improvement of 20 mm from baseline on the visual analog scale was evaluated as the primary end point. RESULTS: Twenty patients were recruited in each group; mean +/- SD age was 13.5 +/- 2.8 years. In comparison with the placebo group, a significantly greater proportion of patients given dexamethasone achieved pain relief within the first 12 hours (12/20 vs 5/19; P =.03). On further follow-up, the proportions achieving pain relief were similar between groups: 11 of 20 vs 6 of 20 at 24 hours (P =.10); 11 of 20 vs 11 of 20 at 48 hours (P>.99); 15 of 20 vs 15 of 19 at 72 hours (P =.93); and 18 of 19 vs 19 of 20 at day 7 (P>.99), with dexamethasone vs placebo, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The short-lived relief of pain in acute exudative pharyngitis in children with suspected infectious mononucleosis may suggest that a single oral dose of dexamethasone may not be sufficient and that additional doses may be necessary for ensuring lasting relief.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".