Effect of ambient air pollution on the incidence of appendicitis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The pathogenesis of appendicitis is unclear. We evaluated whether exposure to air pollution was associated with an increased incidence of appendicitis. METHODS: We identified 5191 adults who had been admitted to hospital with appendicitis between Apr. 1, 1999, and Dec. 31, 2006. The air pollutants studied were ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and suspended particulate matter of less than 10 micro and less than 2.5 micro in diameter. We estimated the odds of appendicitis relative to short-term increases in concentrations of selected pollutants, alone and in combination, after controlling for temperature and relative humidity as well as the effects of age, sex and season. RESULTS: An increase in the interquartile range of the 5-day average of ozone was associated with appendicitis (odds ratio [OR] 1.14, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.03-1.25). In summer (July-August), the effects were most pronounced for ozone (OR 1.32, 95% CI 1.10-1.57), sulfur dioxide (OR 1.30, 95% CI 1.03-1.63), nitrogen dioxide (OR 1.76, 95% CI 1.20-2.58), carbon monoxide (OR 1.35, 95% CI 1.01-1.80) and particulate matter less than 10 micro in diameter (OR 1.20, 95% CI 1.05-1.38). We observed a significant effect of the air pollutants in the summer months among men but not among women (e.g., OR for increase in the 5-day average of nitrogen dioxide 2.05, 95% CI 1.21-3.47, among men and 1.48, 95% CI 0.85-2.59, among women). The double-pollutant model of exposure to ozone and nitrogen dioxide in the summer months was associated with attenuation of the effects of ozone (OR 1.22, 95% CI 1.01-1.48) and nitrogen dioxide (OR 1.48, 95% CI 0.97-2.24). INTERPRETATION: Our findings suggest that some cases of appendicitis may be triggered by short-term exposure to air pollution. If these findings are confirmed, measures to improve air quality may help to decrease rates of appendicitis.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.005 | 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".