Short-term reuse of catheters is associated with microbiological and structural burden: A prospective pilot case series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this pilot study was to assess the short-term microbiological burden and surface damage of catheters for intermittent catheterization (IC) in adult individuals with chronic (> 1-year) spinal cord injury (SCI). Three participants (two females, one male mean age 52 years) were asked to clean and reuse polyvinyl chloride catheters for IC over three days. Urine and catheter swab samples were collected on each day for microbiological analysis. After reuse, all catheters were analyzed via electron microscopy. Of all catheter swab cultures, 14 were negative, 12 were contaminated (i.e. skin or mixed flora), and one had growth of Haematomicrobium sanguinis . All urine cultures revealed either growth of Escherichia coli (n=10) in participants 1 and 2, or Klebsiella pneumoniae (n=4) or mixed enteric flora (n=1) in participant 3. Since all participants had asymptomatic bacteriuria with a significant number of colony-forming units per liter (CFU/L, i.e. > 100’000’000) prior to the study, we could not observe additional increases in the microbial growth (i.e. urine culture). Electron microscopy showed signs of surface damage, accumulation of debris and bacterial colonization on the exterior surface and lumen of the reused catheters. Thus, future studies should exclude participants with pre-study bacteriuria. Furthermore, a longer study duration as well as conducting electron microscopy of catheters after varied days of reuse could provide even better evidence on how structural and microbial changes of reused catheters progress over time.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".