High frequency of Taenia solium antigen positivity in patients admitted for neurological disorders in the Rural Hospital of Mosango, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background The epidemiology of human cysticercosis and neurocysticercosis, caused by the larval stage of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium , is not well known in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As part of an etiological study, we consecutively evaluated from 2012 to 2016 all patients older than 5 years admitted for neurological disorders (neurology cohort) at the rural hospital of Mosango, province of Kwilu, DRC. No neuroimaging was available. A similar study was conducted among patients presenting with persistent fever (> 7 days) during the same period in the same hospital. In both studies, etiological diagnosis relied on a systematic set of reference laboratory assays and on pre-established clinical case definitions. The aim of this post-hoc analysis was to determine the frequency of T. solium infection in these neurology and persistent fever cohorts and to explore its association with specific neurological presentations and final etiological diagnoses. Methods We conducted a descriptive and analytic study between the group of neurological syndrome patients and persistent fever based on the presence or not the cysticercosis IgG using the B158/B60 enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and of the LDBIO Cysticercosis Western Blot IgG assay, respectively.. Results For the neurology cohort, 340 samples (of 351 enrolled patients) were available for analysis (males: 46.8%; mean age: 38.9 years). T. solium antigen positivity was found in 43 participants (12.6%; 95% confidence interval [CI] 9.3-16.7%), including 9 of 60 (15%) patients with epilepsy. Of the 148 evaluated samples from the persistent fever cohort (males: 39.9%; mean age: 19.9 years), 7 had positive T. solium antigen (4.7%; 95% CI 1.9-9.5%; P=0.009 when compared to the neurology cohort). No significant association was found within the neurology cohort between positivity and clinical presentation or final diagnoses. Of note, the antibody-based assay was found positive in only four (1.3%) of the participants of the neurology cohort and in none of the persistent fever cohort. Conclusions T. solium antigen positivity was frequent in patients admitted with neurological disorders in the Kwilu province, DRC. Further neuroimaging studies should explore whether neurocysticercosis is prevalent in this region.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".