The increasing number of surgically excised chalazion during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose: Our goal is to determine the number of excised chalazion over the last 16 years to see if there is an increase in the last 36 months, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: In this retrospective study, 1772 surgically excised cases of chalazion were reviewed. The date range was between 2007 and 2021, and cases were grouped in intervals of 36 months. Information regarding age, sex, and location of the chalazion was also obtained. Results: Of all cases, 54% of the patients ( n = 952) were male and 46% ( n = 820) were female. The mean age was 46.26 years, ranging from 44.65 to 47.28 in the different groups. There was a relative increase in the number of excised chalazion over the last 36 months. From 2019 to 2021, 506 cases were diagnosed. There were fewer cases in the other groups, as follows: 2016–2018-455 cases; 2013–2015-283 cases; 2010–2012-302 cases; and 2007–2009-226 cases. Regarding location of the excised lesion, 1098 (62%) were in the upper eyelid and 674 (38%) were in the lower eyelid. Conclusion: In the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer patients sought medical care for nonurgent conditions, such as chalazion. However, our data showed that despite that decrease, there was an increased number in chalazion excisions. Among several possible explanations, we suggest that the use of oral protection, such as masks, could have an impact in the increased incidence of chalazion, particularly the ones that end up being surgically removed.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".