Abstract 13: Elevated Atmospheric Levels of Environmental Allergens Might be Associated with Decreased Risk of an Immunologic Reaction to an Etiologic Trigger in Kawasaki Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: There is considerable interest in identifying potential etiologic and/or triggering agents for the severe immune response associated with Kawasaki disease (KD). The presence of environmental allergens might modulate the odds of triggering such a response despite those allergens not being direct etiologic agents. Methods: We queried the Canadian hospital discharge database (Canadian Institute for Health Information) for hospital admissions associated with a discharge diagnosis of KD in 2011 in the Greater Toronto Area. Atmospheric levels of pollens (35 species), spores (24 species) and fungi (27 species) were measured by Aerobiology Research Laboratories (Nepean, Ontario). A number of separate models were tested using theoretical incubation periods of 0, 7, 14 or 21 days. Correlation between KD cases and atmospheric levels of environmental allergens were assessed in linear regression models. Results: n=145 patients with KD were included. The highest levels of environmental allergens were in summer months. Overall atmospheric pollens levels were not associated with the KD cases (total pollen count r=0.04, p=0.54); there was no consistent pattern of association with specific pollens. . However, higher levels of spores were associated with a decreased prevalence of KD for all spore species (r=-0.23, p<0.001). Associations were observed for 6 of 19 specific species detected (p<0.001), including leptosphaeria, ascospores, oospore, coprinus/coprinellus, basidiospores, and uredinales . The same pattern was observed for all fungi species (r=-0.17, p=0.009). Associations were observed for 5 of 26 specific fungal species (p=0.002), including alternaria, cladosporium, epicoccum, fusarium, and fungi imperfecti . There were no discernable patterns regarding a potential incubation period. Conclusions: High levels of environmental allergens, particularly fungus and spores, were associated with lower incidence of KD. These results suggest that environmental allergens, even if they are not etiologic agents for KD, might modulate the threshold necessary for the actual etiologic/triggering agent. Atmospheric levels of environmental allergens might be partly responsible for the KD seasonality patterns observed in Canada.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".