Non-adherence to community oral-antibiotic treatment in children with fast-breathing pneumonia in Malawi– secondary analysis of a prospective cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite significant progress, pneumonia is still the leading cause of infectious deaths in children under five years of age. Poor adherence to antibiotics has been associated with treatment failure in World Health Organisation (WHO) defined clinical pneumonia; therefore, improving adherence could improve outcomes in children with fast-breathing pneumonia. We examined clinical factors that may affect adherence to oral antibiotics in children in the community setting in Malawi. METHODS: We conducted a sub-analysis of a prospective cohort of children aged 2-59 months diagnosed by community health workers (CHW) in rural Malawi with WHO fast-breathing pneumonia. Clinical factors identified during CHW diagnosis were investigated using multivariate logistic regression for association with non-adherence, including concurrent diagnoses and treatments. Adherence was measured at both 80% and 100% completion of prescribed oral antibiotics. RESULTS: Eight hundred thirty-four children were included in our analysis, of which 9.5% and 20.0% were non-adherent at 80% and 100% of treatment completion, respectively. A concurrent infectious diagnosis (OR: 1.76, 95% CI: 0.84-2.96/OR: 1.81, 95% CI: 1.21-2.71) and an illness duration of >24 h prior to diagnosis (OR: 2.14, 95% CI: 1.27-3.60/OR: 1.88, 95% CI: 1.29-2.73) had higher odds of non-adherence when measured at both 80% and 100%. Older age was associated with lower odds of non-adherence when measured at 80% (OR: 0.41, 95% CI: 0.21-0.78). CONCLUSION: Non-adherence to oral antibiotics was not uncommon in this rural sub-Saharan African setting. As multiple diagnoses by the CHW and longer illness were important factors, this provides an opportunity for further investigation into targeted interventions and refinement of referral guidelines at the community level. Further research into the behavioural drivers of non-adherence within this setting is needed.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".