Bibliographic record
Abstract
IBS patients require diagnosis, advice, and a reassuring doctor. For constipated patients who need it, tegaserod is safe and effective. Until recently, there existed little evidence that any therapy was effective for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). The quality of clinical trials was poor,1,2 and no systematic review3,4 can redeem faulty data.5 Mindful of this, pharmaceutical companies now employ modern clinical trial principles to test IBS drugs. The latest of these efforts is an Asia-Pacific randomised controlled trial of tegaserod by Kellow et al , described in this issue of Gut 6 [see page 671] .6 To judge how well tegaserod matches the needs of IBS patients we must examine the trial methods, results, and conclusions, and divine what is missing from the reports. The Asia-Pacific study is similar to Western IBS trials of tegaserod.7,8 These represent substantial improvements in trial methodology. The entered subjects had criteria defined IBS and most had a “non-diarrhoea” bowel habit suitable to the drug’s effects. Recruitment was sufficient to show definitive results, and subjects were double blinded and randomly allocated. A primary global outcome was selected with appropriate secondary measures, and the analysis was “intention to treat”. Primary outcome differences were consistently significant at the pre-decided end point, and over 12 weeks. Tegaserod appears safe (sine qua non for IBS), and post-marketing surveillance should detect unexpected adverse effects. The Kellow study achieved greater therapeutic gain (absolute benefit increase) than prior tegaserod studies (21% v 11.8%7 and …
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 | 0.018 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.005 |
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".