What can we learn by examining variations in the use of urine culture in the management of acute cystitis? A retrospective cohort study with linked administrative data in British Columbia, Canada, 2005-2011
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Urinary tract infections (UTI) are common community-based bacterial infections. Empiric antibiotic recommendations are guided by local resistance rates. Previous research suggests that cultures are overused for uncomplicated cystitis, but practice patterns have not been described in detail. Variations in culturing have implications for the interpretation of antibiotic resistance rates. METHODS: We used a retrospective cohort study to analyze variations in urine culturing among physicians, controlling for patient and physician characteristics. We identified all outpatient physician visits among adults and children for cystitis in British Columbia between 2005 and 2011 using administrative data and linked these to laboratory data on urine cultures. Using hierarchical generalized linear mixed models we explored variations in urine culture submissions for cystitis (ICD code 595) and the associations with patient and physician characteristics, stratified by patient sex. RESULTS: Urine cultures were associated with 16% of visits for cystitis among females and 9% among males, and 59% of visits overall were associated with antibiotic treatment. Older patients, patients with a recent antibiotic prescription, and long term care residents were significantly less likely to have a culture associated with a cystitis visit, whether male or female. Female physicians and physicians with 16-35 years' experience were more likely to culture, while international medical graduates were less likely-particularly for female visits. Notably, there was substantial unexplained variation among physicians after controlling for physician characteristics: we found a 24-fold variation in the odds of culturing a female UTI between physicians who were otherwise similar. CONCLUSION: Individual physicians show substantial variation in their propensity to submit cultures for cystitis visits. Reducing such variation and encouraging appropriate levels of culturing would support effective antibiotic use.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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".