Which children are still dying from asthma? A 13 year review of pediatric asthma deaths in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor, Pediatric deaths from asthma are rare, however a national inquiry into asthma deaths in the United Kingdom, including 28 children, found that 46% of deaths were avoidable.1 We reviewed all pediatric asthma deaths from 2005 to 2018 in the province of British Columbia, Canada to understand if these patients had risk factors for asthma exacerbations. | METHODSPatients with asthma as a cause of their death were identified from: (1) the Coroner's office if asthma was listed on the Coroner's report as an Immediate Cause of Death or as a Condition Contributing to Death (since 2007 all pediatric asthma deaths are reported to the Coroner's Service with a postmortem examination done if the cause of death is not clear) or (2) the Discharge Abstract database at BC Children's Hospital if they had asthma listed as the most responsible or preadmission diagnosis.BC Children's Hospital is the province's only tertiary care pediatric hospital and provides care for the critically ill children in the province.Patients were included if they died between January 2005 and December 2018, were residents of British Columbia, and were aged 0-18 years at time of death.Data from coroner's records which includes records from primary care physicians and hospital charts were reviewed by a pediatric respirologist (C.Y.) to confirm that asthma was the underlying cause of death and to obtain details of previous asthma care.Administrative data on asthma-related hospitalizations, emergency room visits and dispensed prescription medication was obtained from deidentified provincial and national databases.Risk factors were chosen based on those identified in the national asthma guideline 2 and availability of data.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".