Smokeless tobacco and oral cancer in the Middle East andNorth Africa: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Cancer of the oral cavity is regarded lethal with a fairly low mean 5-year survival rate. The current systematic review and meta-analysis is the first of its kind to examine, if the evidence from the Middle East and North African region indicates an association between oral cancer and tobacco; and evaluates the quality of the evidence that portrays this relationship. METHODS: A search for articles was carried out in October 2017 and then cross-checked at the end of June 2018 using Medline, Web of Science, CINAHL, and Cochrane databases. Retrieved articles were later subjected to eligibility criteria. The search was not limited to any particular research design adopted by the investigators. However, dissertations, theses and opinion-based reviews generated from the search were excluded during the screening of titles and abstracts. Quality of included studies was determined objectively (Newcastle Ottawa Scale) and subjectively. Revman (Version 5.3) was used for conducting the meta-analysis. RESULTS: Six studies satisfied the selection criteria of the current review. The New Castle Ottawa evaluation scale suggested that the three cross-sectional studies and the three case-control studies included in the current review were of relatively low to moderate quality. All included studies explored the association of only one form of smokeless tobacco, i.e. shammah. Three case-control studies revealed a pooled estimate odds ratio of 38.74 (95% CI: 19.50-76.96), indicating that the odds for the occurrence of oral cancer among shammah users were nearly 39 times higher compared to the non-users. CONCLUSIONS: Shammah is a potential risk factor for oral cancer; thus, it is necessary that public health practitioners design and implement effective strategies to prevent the abuse of shammah.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".