An international comparison of asthma, wheeze, and breathing medication use among children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and Objective: There is variation in childhood asthma between countries with typically higher prevalence in “Westernized” nations. We compared asthma prevalence in Eastern and Central European regions and Canada. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey study investigating the lung health of children (5-15 years). Participants were from one urban centre (>150,000 inhabitants) in each of Canada, Belarus, Poland, Republic of Georgia (Adjara), Republic of Macedonia, and Ukraine. Surveys were distributed through randomly selected schools to parents between 2013 and 2015. A history of diagnosed asthma, ever wheeze, and medication use was assessed. Results: The prevalence of asthma differed by country (Canada: 20.6%; Poland: 13.1%; Macedonia: 2.3%; Belarus: 1.9%; Georgia (Adjara): 1.8%; Ukraine: 1.5%; p<0.001). This association remained after adjustment for potential confounders. Except for Canada (58.7%) and Poland (42.5%), less than 10% of children with a history of wheeze had a diagnosis of asthma. Regardless of country, more than 50% of children with a diagnosis of asthma used breathing medications in the past year and, except for Belarus, a high proportion of those without asthma but who wheezed reported using breathing medication in the past year (18.3% in Georgia (Adjara) to 34.2% in Macedonia). Finally, except for Georgia (12.1%), all countries had a prevalence of ever wheeze above 20% (23.8% in Poland to 30.9% in Macedonia). Conclusions: While there were large differences in asthma prevalence, respiratory morbidity was more comparable between countries suggesting asthma prevalence may be underestimated and further validation of asthma diagnosis is needed.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".