Mortality in children with complicated severe acute malnutrition is related to intestinal and systemic inflammation: an observational cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Diarrhea affects a large proportion of children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM). However, its etiology and clinical consequences remain unclear. OBJECTIVE: We investigated diarrhea, enteropathogens, and systemic and intestinal inflammation for their interrelation and their associations with mortality in children with SAM. DESIGN: Intestinal pathogens (n = 15), cytokines (n = 29), fecal calprotectin, and the short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) butyrate and propionate were determined in children aged 6-59 mo (n = 79) hospitalized in Malawi for complicated SAM. The relation between variables, diarrhea, and death was assessed with partial least squares (PLS) path modeling. RESULTS: Fatal subjects (n = 14; 18%) were younger (mean ± SD age: 17 ± 11 compared with 25 ± 11 mo; P = 0.01) with higher prevalence of diarrhea (46% compared with 18%, P = 0.03). Intestinal pathogens Shigella (36%), Giardia (33%), and Campylobacter (30%) predominated, but their presence was not associated with death or diarrhea. Calprotectin was significantly higher in children who died [median (IQR): 1360 mg/kg feces (2443-535 mg/kg feces) compared with 698 mg/kg feces (1438-244 mg/kg feces), P = 0.03]. Butyrate [median (IQR): 31 ng/mL (112-22 ng/mL) compared with 2036 ng/mL (5800-149 ng/mL), P = 0.02] and propionate [median (IQR): 167 ng/mL (831-131 ng/mL) compared with 3174 ng/mL (5819-357 ng/mL), P = 0.04] were lower in those who died. Mortality was directly related to high systemic inflammation (path coefficient = 0.49), whereas diarrhea, high calprotectin, and low SCFA production related to death indirectly via their more direct association with systemic inflammation. CONCLUSIONS: Diarrhea, high intestinal inflammation, low concentrations of fecal SCFAs, and high systemic inflammation are significantly related to mortality in SAM. However, these relations were not mediated by the presence of intestinal pathogens. These findings offer an important understanding of inflammatory changes in SAM, which may lead to improved therapies. This trial was registered at www.controlled-trials.com as ISRCTN13916953.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".