217 Pregnancies in a prospective cohort of women in non-traditional work (the WHAT-ME study)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives The WHAT-ME study (Women’s health in apprenticeship trades- metalworkers and electricians) was established because of concerns about risk to the fetus of women welding in pregnancy. Methods Women in registered apprenticeships since 2005 in welding, boiler-making, steam fitting/pipefitting (‘welders’) or electrical trades are invited to join the study. They complete questionnaires on health and exposure at baseline and subsequently every six months. All new pregnancies are followed for exposure and outcome. Results To date 496 women have signed up, with 63 new pregnancies notified by study members: recruitment is now underway across Canada. The results here are from 385 early recruits (mean age 31.6 years) and we consider only first pregnancies from the baseline questionnaire. We know of 174 first pregnancies (90 welders; 84 electricians): 3 welders chose not to give this information. Elective abortion was frequent, particularly in welders: 64 welders and 66 electricians continued the pregnancy. Spontaneous abortion rates were similar (welders 12/64; electricians 16/66). Only 25 welders and 11 electricians were working in their trade at the start of their first pregnancy and elected not to terminate it. Among these, spontaneous abortion rates were 40% (10/25) for welders and 18% (2/11) for electricians. In a logistic regression allowing for age and cumulative months in the trade at conception, the risk of miscarriage for welders in their trade was raised (OR = 3.51 95% CI 1.19–10.37). No marked effect was seen on live birth weight (welders 7.25 lbs; electricians 7.43 lbs) but infertility >12 months was more likely to be reported by welders: 11/201 welders and 3/184 electricians were working in their trade at the start of a period of infertility (X2 = 4.05 p = 0.04) Conclusions Early data from WHAT-ME are consistent with some reproductive hazard to welders. The cohort’s increasing size and prospective data collection will serve to confirm or refute these results.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".