A Summary of a Cochrane Review: Probiotics to Prevent Acute Upper Respiratory Tract Infections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Review authors in the Cochrane Collaboration conducted a systematic review to evaluate the effects of probiotics to prevent acute upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) such as the common cold and acute sinusitis in people at average risk of a URTI. After extensive searching for all relevant studies, the authors identified 12 randomized controlled trials that tested the effects of different types of probiotics on the development or duration of a URTI episode. Six studies were in children, 3 in adults, and 2 in older people. This summary presents the findings from this review. Probiotics are live microorganisms, primarily bacteria, that are believed to provide health benefits when ingested. There are several different types and strains of probiotics that are commonly used, such as Lactobacillus, Streptococcus, and Bifidobacterium. Probiotics can be taken with milk products, as a powder, or in capsules and do not require a prescription. There has been some research into whether taking probiotics could p...
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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 | 0.008 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".