Association between Proximity to Major Roads and Sputum Cell Counts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Air pollution caused by motor vehicle emissions has been associated with exacerbations of obstructive airway diseases; however, the nature of the resulting bronchitis has not been quantified. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether proximity to major roads or highways is associated with an increase in sputum neutrophils or eosinophils, and to evaluate the effect of proximity to roads on spirometry and exacerbations in patients with asthma. METHODS: A retrospective study of 485 sputum cell counts from patients attending a tertiary chest clinic in Hamilton, Ontario, identified eosinophilic or neutrophilic bronchitis. Patients' residences were geocoded to the street network of Hamilton using geographic information system software. Associations among bronchitis, lung function, and proximity to major roads and highways were examined using multinomial logistic and multivariate linear regression analyses adjusted for patient age, smoking status and corticosteroid medications. RESULTS: Patients living within 1000 m of highways showed an increased risk of bronchitis (OR 3.8 [95% CI 1.0 to 13.7]; P<0.05), particularly neutrophilic bronchitis (OR 4.7 [95% CI 1.2 to 18.7]; P<0.05) as well as an increased risk of an asthma diagnosis (OR 1.9 [95% CI 1.0 to 3.4]; P<0.05). Patients living within 300 m of a major road were at increased risk for an asthma exacerbation (OR 1.9 [95% CI 1.5 to 15.5]; P<0.01) and lower lung function, particularly in women (P=0.036). CONCLUSION: In patients with airway diseases, living close to a highway or major road was associated with neutrophilic bronchitis, an increased risk of asthma diagnosis, asthma exacerbations and lower lung function.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".