Classical Koro and Koro-Like Symptoms: Illustration from Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Koro syndrome has been colorfully described as a pathological distortion of one’s body image of the genital organ. In Koro, body image dysphoria is characterized by severe anxiety related to the delusional idea that one’s genitals will shrink and retract into one’s abdomen, eventually leading to death. This syndrome was first reported in South East Asia, where endemics have been described, but it has also sporadically occurred globally. We present a systematic literature review on Koro syndrome and report 7 cases from Canada. A search review with PubMed and Google Scholar resulted in 504 entries. Sixty-seven manuscripts were eventually selected following a thorough elimination process. The resultant literature underscored the cultural diversity that underlay the reported cases. Various aspects of Koro have been examined (eg, etiological, clinical, diagnostic, and cultural aspects). It has stimulated substantial scholarly debate, discussions, correspondences, and arguments from anthropological, psychiatric, psychological, and biological perspectives. In our series, it seems that Koro could have been misattributed here. The primary concern was not with penile retraction of the cases. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a series of cases is documented from North America where the syndrome is often ignored. We highlight the potential differences between the classical Koro syndrome and a collection of beliefs related to the perception or delusion of penile retraction in other codable psychiatric disorders, Koro-like syndrome. Understanding Koro syndrome beyond geographic boundaries is in line with our collected case reports of Koro from outside Asia.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".