Incidence of open neural tube defects in Nova Scotia after folic acid fortification.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: With the goal of preventing open neural tube defects (NTDs), recommendations for folic acid supplementation before conception were introduced in Canada in 1994, and by November 1998 Canadian grain products were being fortified with folic acid. We wished to determine whether the annual incidence of open NTDs in Nova Scotia, including those in stillbirths and terminated pregnancies, changed after the introduction of either folic acid supplementation or fortification. METHODS: For the 10-year period from Jan. 1, 1991, to Dec. 31, 2000, we retrospectively extracted the total number of births in Nova Scotia and the number of live births and stillbirths with open NTDs from the Nova Scotia Atlee Perinatal Database as well as the number of terminated pregnancies affected by NTDs from the Fetal Anomaly Database. We determined the total annual incidence of all open NTDs, and of the subgroups spina bifida and anencephaly, per 1000 births in the province during the periods before (1991-1994) and after (1995-1998) folic acid supplementation initiatives were begun but before folic acid fortification of grain products was implemented, and during the periods before (1991-1997) and after (1998-2000) fortification. RESULTS: In the period after supplementation initiatives were begun but before fortification was implemented, the incidence of open NTDs did not change significantly: the mean annual rate was 2.55 per 1000 births during 1991-1994 and 2.61 per 1000 births during 1995-1997 (relative risk [RR] 1.02, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.77-1.35). After the fortification was implemented the incidence of open NTDs decreased by more than 50%: the mean annual rate was 2.58 per 1000 births during 1991-1997 and 1.17 per 1000 births during 1998-2000 (relative risk 0.46, 95% CI 0.32-0.66). INTERPRETATION: The recommendations for folic acid supplementation alone did not appear to succeed in reducing the incidence of open NTDs in Nova Scotia, whereas the fortification of grain products with folic acid did result in a significant reduction in the incidence.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".