Visibility of the urethral meatus and risk of urinary tract infections in uncircumcised boys
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Uncircumcised boys are at higher risk for urinary tract infections than circumcised boys. Whether this risk varies with the visibility of the urethral meatus is not known. Our aim was to determine whether there is a hierarchy of risk among uncircumcised boys whose urethral meatuses are visible to differing degrees. METHODS: We conducted a prospective cross-sectional study in one pediatric emergency department. We screened 440 circumcised and uncircumcised boys. Of these, 393 boys who were not toilet trained and for whom the treating physician had requested a catheter urine culture were included in our analysis. At the time of catheter insertion, a nurse characterized the visibility of the urethral meatus (phimosis) using a 3-point scale (completely visible, partially visible or nonvisible). Our primary outcome was urinary tract infection, and our primary exposure variable was the degree of phimosis: completely visible versus partially or nonvisible urethral meatus. RESULTS: Cultures grew from urine samples from 30.0% of uncircumcised boys with a completely visible meatus, and from 23.8% of those with a partially or nonvisible meatus (p = 0.4). The unadjusted odds ratio (OR) for culture growth was 0.73 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.35-1.52), and the adjusted OR was 0.41 (95% CI 0.17-0.95). Of the boys who were circumcised, 4.8% had urinary tract infections, which was significantly lower than the rate among uncircumcised boys with a completely visible urethral meatus (unadjusted OR 0.12 [95% CI 0.04-0.39], adjusted OR 0.07 [95% CI 0.02-0.26]). INTERPRETATION: We did not see variation in the risk of urinary tract infection with the visibility of the urethral meatus among uncircumcised boys. Compared with circumcised boys, we saw a higher risk of urinary tract infection in uncircumcised boys, irrespective of urethral visibility.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".