Antenatal corticosteroids reduce neonatal mortality in settings without assisted ventilatory support: a retrospective cohort study of early preterm births on the Thailand-Myanmar border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Prematurity is the highest risk for under-five mortality globally. The aim of the study was to assess the effect of antenatal dexamethasone on neonatal mortality in early preterm in a resource-constrained setting without assisted ventilation. Methods: This retrospective (2008-2013) cohort study in clinics for refugees/migrants on the Thai-Myanmar border included infants born <34 weeks gestation at home, in, or on the way to the clinic. Dexamethasone, 24 mg (three 8 mg intramuscular doses, every 8 hours), was prescribed to women at risk of preterm birth (28 to <34 weeks). Appropriate newborn care was available: including oxygen but not assisted ventilation. Mortality and maternal fever were compared by the number of doses (complete: three, incomplete (one or two), or no dose). A sub-cohort participated in neurodevelopmental testing at one year. Results: Of 15,285 singleton births, 240 were included: 96 did not receive dexamethasone and 144 received one, two or three doses (56, 13 and 75, respectively). Of live-born infants followed to day 28, (n=168), early neonatal and neonatal mortality/1,000 livebirths (95%CI) with complete dosing was 217 (121-358) and 304 (190-449); compared to 394 (289-511) and 521 (407-633) with no dose. Compared to complete dosing, both incomplete and no dexamethasone were associated with elevated adjusted ORs 4.09 (1.39 to 12.00) and 3.13 (1.14 to 8.63), for early neonatal death. By contrast, for neonatal death, while there was clear evidence that no dosing was associated with higher mortality, adjusted OR 3.82 (1.42 to 10.27), the benefit of incomplete dosing was uncertain adjusted OR 1.75 (0.63 to 4.81). No adverse impact of dexamethasone on infant neurodevelopmental scores (12 months) or maternal fever was observed. Conclusions: Neonatal mortality reduction is possible with complete dexamethasone dosing in pregnancies at risk of preterm birth in settings without capacity to provide assisted ventilation.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".