Hip Fractures in Older Adults in Ontario, Canada—Monthly Variation, Insights, and Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In older adults, hip fractures have been described to peak in cooler months. Seasonal differences in patient vulnerability to fracture and social/behavioural factors might contribute to these trends. METHODS: Using linked health-care databases in Ontario Canada, we examined monthly variation in hip fracture hospitalizations in those > 65 years (2011-2015). We stratified results by age category (66-79, ≥80 years). We then examined for variation in the demographic and comorbidity profiles of patients across the months, and as an index of contributing social/behavioural factors, noted variation in health-care behaviours. RESULTS: There were 47,971 and 52,088 hospitalizations for hip fracture in those 66-79, and ≥80 years, respectively. There was strong seasonality in fractures in both groups. Peaks occurred in October and December when patients appeared most vulnerable. Rates fell in the summer in those 66-79 years, and in the late winter in those ≥80 years (when health-care utilization also declined). A smaller peak in fractures occurred in May in both groups. CONCLUSIONS: Hip fractures peak in the autumn, early winter, and spring in Canada. A dip in fractures occurs in the late winter in the oldest old. Environmental factors might play a role, but seasonal vulnerability to fracture and winter isolation might also be influential.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".