The association between urinary continence and quality of life in paediatric patients with spina bifida and tethered cord
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine the association between urinary continence and quality of life (QoL) in a paediatric spina bifida population. METHODS: After appropriate ethics approval, a prospective study was initiated using multiple validated QoL instruments that were distributed to patients as they presented for their annual appointment at the Northern Alberta Spina Bifida Clinic (Edmonton, Alberta). General demographic information was collected and validated questionnaires were used. The survey package included two instruments to assess overall QoL: Global Pediatric QoL (PedsQL 4.0) and Health Specific QoL-Spina Bifida (HRQoL-SB). Two instruments were also included to quantify urinary symptoms and assess urinary specific QoL: the Urinary Incontinence Severity Index - Pediatric (ISI-P) and Urinary Specific QoL (PinQ). RESULTS: A total of 71 patients were enrolled in the study. The general QoL (PedsQL 4.0) and health-specific QoL (HRQoL-SB) scores for the population indicated an overall QoL of 66% (n=69) and 83% (n=67), respectively. Approximately 46% (33 of 71) reported >1 episode of urinary incontinence per week. Urinary continence was associated with a significantly higher urinary-specific QoL (PinQ; P<0.001), general QoL (PedsQL 4.0; P<0.05) and health-specific QoL (HRQoL-SB; P<0.05). Furthermore, urinary incontinence and its effect on QoL was not influenced by the presence of a shunt, level of the lesion or manner of dysraphism. CONCLUSION: These data suggest that QoL in patients with spina bifida is related to urinary continence. This effect appears to be independent of the type and level of the spinal dysraphism and the presence or absence of a shunt.
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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".