Selection Bias Explains Apparent Differential Mortality between Dialysis Modalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relative risk of death for patients treated with peritoneal dialysis compared with those treated with hemodialysis appears to change with duration of dialysis therapy. Patients who start dialysis urgently are at high risk for mortality and are treated almost exclusively with hemodialysis, introducing bias to such mortality comparisons. To better isolate the association between dialysis treatment modality and patient mortality, we examined the relative risk for mortality for peritoneal dialysis compared with hemodialysis among individuals who received ≥4 months of predialysis care and who started dialysis electively as outpatients. From a total of 32,285 individuals who received dialysis in Ontario, Canada during a nearly 8-year period, 6,573 patients met criteria for elective, outpatient initiation. We detected no difference in survival between peritoneal dialysis and hemodialysis after adjusting for relevant baseline characteristics. The relative risk of death did not change with duration of dialysis therapy in our primary analysis, but it did change with time when we defined our patient population using the more inclusive criteria typical of previous studies. These results suggest that peritoneal dialysis and hemodialysis associate with similar survival among incident dialysis patients who initiate dialysis electively, as outpatients, after at least 4 months of predialysis care. Selection bias, rather than an effect of the treatment itself, likely explains the previously described change in the relative risk of death over time between hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".