Study of the prevalence of Frank’s sign in a general population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Frank’s sign is a diagonal crease in the earlobe that extends from the tragus to the inferior-posterior auricle’s edge. Described as a predictor of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), it was considered an independent cardiovascular risk factor (CRF) and associated with cerebrovascular events and cognitive impairment (CI). Objectives: To assess the prevalence of Frank’s sign in a general population aged 60 years or older regardless of the presence of CRFs and to relate the presence of this sign with epidemiological and clinical aspects. Design and setting: This is an analytical, observational and cross- sectional study accomplished in ABC Region and in Itapecerica da Serra (Greater São Paulo). Methods: 500 individuals aged 60 years or older randomly recruited had their ears photographed, responded to either Mini Mental State Examination or Montreal Cognitive Assessment depending on education achievement. Results: 57% were women; 57% were white, 39% black and 4% asian; 64% had the sign; Frank’s sign was associated with dyslipidemia and almost with hypertension, but not with cardiovascular events or CI. Conclusions: 1. Frank’s sign was more prevalent in older people and in the white population and, for the first time, in women. 2. There is a pattern in the sign prevalence in Greater São Paulo, which differs from the international one. 3. Frank’s sign may be more sensitive to CVDs in hospitalized patients than in the general population and it can be a bias in literature. 4. Prospective studies could assure whether this sign is a marker for CVDs in this population.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".