An Evaluation of Hepatitis C Screening in Infants and Children Born to Seropositive Mothers in Saint John, New Brunswick
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The primary route of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in children is vertical transmission, from mother to fetus in utero. There is a lack of data on the prevalence of pediatric HCV acquired through vertical transmission in Saint John, New Brunswick. Furthermore, what risk factors may be associated with an increased likelihood for a child born to an HCV-seropositive mother should be known to direct screening practices. METHODS: A retrospective chart review of the active charts from the local HCV clinic, the Centre for Research, Education & Clinical Care of At-Risk Populations (RECAP), identified HCV-seropositive women who had children at-risk of HCV through vertical transmission. Sociodemographic information and various risk factors were collected, including maternal HCV genotype, non-prescription drug use subcategorized into intravenous drug use and snorting, transfusion history, involvement in opiate substitution therapy, postal code as a proxy for socioeconomic status, and issues of custodianship within the family. A 2 x 2 chi-square analysis was conducted to assess the frequency of HCV screening for children by the presence or absence of familial custodianship issues. RESULTS: In total, data from 62 HCV-seropositive women and 123 infants and children at-risk for HCV were included in this study. HCV status at the time of pregnancy revealed 18 (14.6%) with a positive HCV screen, 14 (11.4%) with a positive viral load, and 91 (74.0%) with unknown status. A total of 30 children (24.4%) had HCV screening performed, of which three (10.0%) were HCV-antibody positive and had a detectable viral load. Results of the chi-square analysis indicated that issues of custodianship had no significant influence on child screening rates. CONCLUSION: Overall, this study highlighted the inconsistent screening practices of children at-risk for HCV through vertical transmission, as well as the need for improvement in chart documentation and follow-up. Clinicians and researchers should focus their efforts toward proactively identifying children at-risk for HCV through vertical transmission. This could involve screening during pregnancy and subsequent follow-up, or at other points of contact with the healthcare system, such as parental involvement with opioid substitution therapy or well-child visits. Implementation of a targeted screening program could be considered in urban centers similar to the one in this study to connect at-risk populations with essential medical and community services.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".