Usage of Antifungal Drugs for Therapy of Genital <i>Candida</i>Infections, Purchased as Over‐the‐Counter Products or by Prescription: 1. Analyses of a Unique Database
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To present sales figures of antifungal drugs for treatment of genital Candida infections in females, which had been purchased in the Swedish county of Skåne (with approximately 1.2 million inhabitants) during the 1990s. To study the relative proportions of the drugs sold by prescription and as over-the-counter (OTC) products. METHODS: Sales figures of antifungal drugs for therapy of vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) and such recurrent infections (RVVC), for the years 1990--99, were collected from the 'ACS' database of the National Corporation of Swedish Pharmacies. RESULTS: The study showed an increase in sales of the type of drugs studied from 45,000 packages in 1990 until mid-93/94, when approximately 70,000 packages were sold (mainly azoles for topical use and fluconazole for oral intake). Thereafter there was a decrease until the end of November 1999, when 54,000 packages were purchased. Of the total sales, 93% were OTC products. Sales of clotrimazole and econazole (for vaginal installation) in 1993--1994 were equal to 85-90 packages/1000 women in the age group 15-45 years. Extremely high sales volumes of fluconazole and itraconazole, for one single year each, could be explained by marketing-related activities directed to the medical community. CONCLUSIONS: As many women with RVVC are not cured by iatrogenic initiatives and women consider themselves able to diagnose episodes of genital Candida infection, affected women generally turn to self-medication with antifungal OTC products. This stresses the role of pharmacy counseling. Short-term marked alterations in sales volumes may be due to marketing factors rather than changes in the epidemiology of genital Candida infections.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".