Vaginal Douching, Bacterial Vaginosis, and Spontaneous Preterm Birth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Vaginal douching and bacterial vaginosis (BV) are independently associated with spontaneous preterm birth. Because the interrelationships among these variables remain unclear, we sought to examine the associations in a prospective study. METHODS: We conducted a nested case-control study within a prospectively recruited cohort of pregnant women. We prospectively collected demographic and health status data, data on pre-pregnancy vaginal douching, vaginal smears for bacterial vaginosis as defined by Nugent's criteria, fetal fibronectin at 26 weeks of pregnancy, and placental pathology at delivery. Spontaneous preterm births before 37 weeks' gestation were selected as cases. All spontaneous births occurring after 37 weeks were potential control subjects. To limit costs, some tests were performed only in selected control subjects. RESULTS: Preterm birth occurred in 207 of 5092 women (4.1%). In bivariate analysis, BV was not associated with preterm birth (OR 1.2; 95% CI 0.5 to 2.4). Vaginal douching was significantly associated with bacterial vaginosis (P < 0.05) and preterm birth (P < 0.05). On multivariate analysis, vaginal douching was no longer associated with preterm birth, but a significant association with early preterm birth < 34 weeks (OR, 6.9; 95% CI 1.7 to 28.2) and preterm birth due to preterm labour (OR 3.0; 95% CI 1.1 to 8.5) persisted after controlling for the presence of bacterial vaginosis and placental inflammation. CONCLUSION: Vaginal douching and bacterial vaginosis were not associated with spontaneous preterm birth overall. However, vaginal douching appears to be an independent and potentially modifiable risk factor for early preterm birth (32-34 weeks), although the mechanism remains unclear.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".