Antibiotics for lower respiratory tract infections. Still too frequently prescribed?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine how Canadian family physicians currently prescribe for lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs). DESIGN: Prospective assessment of adults with symptoms of LRTIs. SETTING: Offices of 120 community-based members of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. PARTICIPANTS: Four hundred seven adults (16 years and older). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Clinical findings, diagnoses, tests ordered, and prescriptions for antibiotics were documented on a standardized form. RESULTS: Antibiotics were prescribed to 58.4% of patients presenting with symptoms of LRTIs. Prescribing was higher (77.9%) for those diagnosed with acute bronchitis, which accounted for 70.3% of prescriptions. Physicians were often uncertain about the need for antibiotics, were concerned that patients could become sicker, and felt pressured by patients to prescribe antibiotics. Macrolides were most frequently prescribed; no tests were ordered in 85.0% of encounters. CONCLUSION: The number of antibiotic prescriptions for adults with LRTIs remains high in Canada. Rates of prescribing are increased by diagnosis of acute bronchitis, clinical uncertainty, pressure from patients to receive antibiotics, and concern that patients will deteriorate if left untreated.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".