21: Severe Alcohol Intoxication Among Canadian Adolescents: Data from First 18 Months of Surveillance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alcohol is the most commonly used drug by Canadian adolescents, and can lead to a host of negative short and long-term outcomes. Understanding more about youth drinking can help develop more effective strategies for treatment and prevention. This study, gathering data through the Canadian Pediatric Surveillance Program (CPSP), has been initiated to fill in knowledge gaps and provide epidemiologic data about severe alcohol intoxication among Canadian adolescents. The objectives of the surveillance study included: 1) To obtain national epidemiological data outlining the incidence of severe alcohol intoxication among adolescents. 2) To describe the demographics, presentation to hospital, co-ingestions, co-morbidities, management and short-term outcomes. 3) To use the data to increase awareness and education. 4) To facilitate harm reduction strategies. Through the established methodology of the CPSP, paediatric physicians have been actively surveyed on a monthly basis for identified cases of severe alcohol intoxication. A detailed questionnaire was then completed for each new case. The case definition includes any adolescent meeting the following criteria: Between 11–15 years of age Blood alcohol level >0 g/L (if drawn) Presenting with severe intoxication with impaired consciousness requiring prolonged ER observation (≥6 h) or hospital admission. Interim analysis from the initial 18 months of data collection yielded 42 reported cases, and 37 completed questionnaires. Of these, 31 cases met the case definition. There were 15 males and 16 females, with a mean age of 14.4 years. Cases were reported from across the country, except from Manitoba and the Territories. The age of first-ever alcohol use was unknown for the majority of cases (n=22, 73.3%), and only 13.3% of these adolescents were known to have a prior ER visit related to alcohol use. The mean blood alcohol level was 2.4 g/L. There was no difference in blood alcohol level between sexes. Twenty seven cases contained information on type of alcohol use, with the majority of cases (21, 77.8%) indicating the use of “spirits”. Alcohol was frequently consumed outside of the parents' home, at friends, parties or outdoors (22/30 cases, 73%). Concurrent use of other substances was common (11/28, 39.3%), most frequently cannabis. Ten (32.3%) of these adolescents required mechanical respiratory assistance. No child died from severe alcohol intoxication. Follow-up was provided for 20 (66.7%) cases, the majority from adolescent medicine subspecialty clinics. To date, a number of Canadian adolescents with severe alcohol intoxication have presented to pediatric ERs, or were admitted at pediatric hospitals, with very high blood alcohol levels. Almost 1/3 of cases required some respiratory support. Concurrent use with other substances was high.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".