Spina bifida, folate metabolism, and dietary folate intake in a Northern Canadian aboriginal population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Inhabitants of the subarctic region of the Eastern James Bay of Northern Quebec consume a diet low in folate. This is largely secondary to poor access to plant-foods and a preferred diet high in meat, fowl, and fish as in many other northern populations. Furthermore, there is a high frequency of spina bifida in the Cree of the region. It was hypothesized that genetically altered folate metabolism as well as low folate intake contributes to the high frequency of spina bifida. METHODS: A case-control study evaluating folate metabolism and the common 677C-T polymorphism of the gene for methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) in mothers of children with spina bifida, and controls (n=23) of Cree descent from the Eastern James Bay region. These results were compared to a similar Montreal cohort (n=152) who were not of First Nations descent. Dietary intake of folate of 219 women of the Eastern James Bay region was also determined. RESULTS: No Cree mothers of children with spina bifida were homozygous for the 677C-T polymorphism of MTHFR. Although serum cobalamin was significantly higher in Cree mothers, RBC folate was significantly lower than in the Montreal cohort. In addition, plasma homocysteine was significantly lower in the Cree. Dietary intake of folate of women in the same region was substantially lower (100 microg/day) than widely recommended daily intakes. CONCLUSIONS: In this remote Canadian aboriginal community there is no evidence of altered folate metabolism in the mothers of children with spina bifida. Nonetheless, it remains essential that culturally appropriate public health efforts be continued to increase the intake of folic acid in the hope of reducing the high frequency of spina bifida in this population.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".