Efficacy and safety of pharmacological treatments for neuroborreliosis—protocol for a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Neuroborreliosis is a tick-borne infectious disease of the nervous system caused by Borrelia burgdorferi. Common clinical manifestations of neuroborreliosis are cranial nerve dysfunctions, polyradiculoneuritis, and meningitis. Diagnosis is usually based on clinical presentation, serologic testing, and analysis of cerebrospinal fluid. Many aspects of pharmacological treatment, such as choice of drug, dosage, and duration are subject of intense debate, leading to uncertainties in patients and healthcare providers alike. To approach the questions regarding pharmacological treatment of neuroborreliosis, we will perform a systematic review. METHODS: We will perform a comprehensive systematic literature search for potentially eligible studies that report outcomes after pharmacological interventions. To adequately consider the wealth of research that has been conducted so far, this review will evaluate randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and non-randomized studies on treatment of neuroborreliosis. We will assess potential risk of bias for each RCT meeting our selection criteria using the Cochrane risk of bias tool for RCTs. For non-randomized studies, we will use the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and the recently piloted Cochrane risk of bias tool for non-randomized studies. Our primary outcome of interest will be neurological symptoms and the secondary outcomes will be disability, patient-reported outcomes (quality of life, and, if reported separately from other neurological symptoms, pain, fatigue, depression, cognition, and sleep), adverse events, and cerebrospinal fluid pleocytosis. Pooling of data and meta-analysis will only be deemed justified between studies with similar design (e.g., RCTs are only combined with other RCTs), characteristics (e.g., similar populations), and of acceptable heterogeneity (I2 < 80%). Pooled estimates will be calculated using RevMan software. Prespecified subgroup analyses will evaluate groups of antibiotics, length of antibiotic treatment, and different doses of doxycycline. We will assess the quality of evidence using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. DISCUSSION: This systematic review will summarize the available evidence from RCTs and non-randomized studies regarding pharmacological treatment of neuroborreliosis. The available evidence will be summarized and discussed to provide a basis for decision-making for patients and healthcare professionals. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO registration number: CRD42014008839.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".