Albendazole Treatment Improves Work Capacity in Women Smallholder Farmers Infected with Hookworm: A Double-Blind Randomized Control Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An estimated 4.7 billion people live in regions exposed to soil-transmitted helminths, intestinal parasites that have significant impacts on the health of women smallholder farmers. The goal of this trial was to determine whether treatment with albendazole impacts the work capacity of these farmers. This is a prospective double-blind, randomized effectiveness trial. Participants ( N = 250) were randomly selected from safe motherhood groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Prevalence/intensity of hookworm infection, hemoglobin, and demographics was obtained. At study (Time = 0), participants were randomized into treatment (albendazole 400 mg) and placebo (similar placebo tablet) groups. A step test was administered as a proxy metric for work capacity. Work capacity was defined as ∆heart rate before and after 3 minutes of step testing, in beats per minute. At study (time = 7 months), the step test was repeated and work capacity remeasured. The ∆work capacity (time = 0 minus time = 7 months) was the primary outcome. Investigators/field assistants were blinded to who was enrolled in groups, hookworm status, and step test results. Regression showed highly significant interactive effects of hookworm status and treatment group relative to ∆work capacity after controlling for resting pulse rate and age ( P < 0.002). Estimated marginal means for work capacity (WC) for each of four groups (hookworm positive plus placebo, hookworm positive plus treatment, hookworm negative plus placebo, and hookworm negative plus treatment) showed women who were hookworm positive and received treatment decreased heart rate by 9.744 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 6.42, 13.07) beats per minute (increased WC), whereas women who were hookworm positive and received placebo saw a nonsignificant decrease of 0.034 (95% CI: −3.16, 3.84) beats per minute. Treatment with albendazole was associated with improved aerobic work capacity posttreatment. Given modest costs of drug distributions, risk benefits of periodic deworming warrants further study in larger controlled trials.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".