Clinical presentation at initiation of maintenance dialysis and subsequent survival: A retrospective cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Clinical practice guidelines increasingly favor a more symptom-driven approach to maintenance dialysis initiation. But, little is known about the clinical presentation at dialysis initiation, such as the different kinds of signs and symptoms present at dialysis initiation, illness acuity at dialysis initiation, and how these aspects of the clinical presentation relate to subsequent survival. METHODS: This is a retrospective cohort study of a random sample of veterans who initiated dialysis between 2000 and 2009 at Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers across the country (N = 1,691). We looked at associations between the clinical presentation (types of signs and/or symptoms and illness acuity) at the time of dialysis initiation and 1-year mortality. FINDINGS: The most common types of signs and/or symptoms at initiation were gastrointestinal (50.9%) and cardiopulmonary (48.7%). The crude mortality rate was 174.2 deaths per 1000 patients per year (95% CI 154.7, 196.1). Among different categories of signs and/or symptoms, only cardiopulmonary signs and/or symptoms were associated with a higher 1-year risk of mortality after initiation (risk ratio (RR) 1.32, 95% CI 1.05, 1.69) in adjusted analyses. Patients who were acutely ill at initiation were more likely to die during the following year as compared with those who initiated dialysis in the outpatient setting (RR 1.57, 95% CI 1.15, 2.21). DISCUSSION: With the exception of cardiopulmonary signs and/or symptoms, most signs and/or symptoms documented around the time of dialysis initiation were not associated with an increased risk of death during the year after initiation. In contrast, whether patients were acutely ill at the time of initiation was strongly associated with an increased risk of death after initiation regardless of the specific signs and/or symptoms present. Limitations of this study include retrospective study design, residual confounding, and lack of generalizability to non-VA settings.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".