Unexplained extra visits to general practitioners before the diagnosis of first urinary tract infection: a case-control study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: To determine: (1) whether children diagnosed with a urinary tract infection (UTI) visited their general practitioner (GP) more frequently before the diagnosis of UTI was established compared to children never diagnosed with a UTI; and (2) whether those children with evidence of renal scarring at their first diagnosed UTI visited their GPs more frequently before diagnosis compared to children who did not have evidence of renal scarring when their first UTI was investigated. METHODS: Case-control study of 77 children with a UTI identified from a hospital radiology database (37 with and 40 without renal scarring), and 77 age, sex, and general practice matched controls. Main outcome measures were entries in general practice clinical records for types of illness, antibiotic prescriptions, and urine samples requested prior to the diagnosis of first UTI (cases) or equivalent time periods for controls. RESULTS: Cases had a mean 2.94 additional visits or 21% more visits (95% CI 1% to 41%) in the period (mean 2.4 years) prior to the visit at which their first UTI was diagnosed, including a mean 2.5 additional visits or 23% more visits for infectious illness (95% CI 1% to 45%). The cases had 114% (95% CI 41% to 184%) more visits for symptoms relating to the genitourinary tract, though the actual number of these visits was small. They were febrile at 49% more visits (95% CI 1% to 99%) and received significantly more courses of antibiotics than controls (5.2 v 4.1). They had more urine samples requested (37 v 3). Both the cases with and without renal scarring had similar excess GP visits. CONCLUSION: Compared to controls, children diagnosed with a first UTI had more visits at which symptoms of infection were recorded and more antibiotics prescribed prior to the visit at which the first UTI was diagnosed. These excess visits may have included undiagnosed UTIs. Both those with and without renal scarring had a similar degree of excess visits; additional aetiological factors must have played a role in scar formation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".