A response bias exists away from Borg Category-Ratio 0-10 scale values without associated verbal descriptors for symptom intensity ratings during cardiopulmonary exercise testing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Borg’s modified Category-Ratio 0-10 (CR10) scale is a 12-point scale with verbal descriptors (e.g., 5=severe, 7=very severe, 9=very, very severe) at each numerical rating other than 6 and 8. A cohort study of 1,048 people with malignant and non-malignant disease reported a lower-than-expected frequency of Borg CR10 ratings of 6 and 8 when breathlessness intensity was assessed at rest (Eur Resp J, 2016, 47:1861). We explored whether a response bias exists away from Borg CR10 ratings 6 and 8 for breathlessness and leg discomfort at peak exercise. We included 1,190 adults aged ≥40 years that completed symptom-limited incremental CPET on a cycle ergometer as part of the Canadian Cohort Obstructive Lung Disease study. A Poisson distribution was applied to determine the expected vs. observed rating frequency for each value on the Borg CR10 scale at peak exercise for breathlessness and leg discomfort. The observed frequency for Borg CR10 rating 6 was lower than expected for breathlessness and leg discomfort (n=61 vs. 180; n=67 vs. 193, p<0.001), as well as for rating 8 for leg discomfort (n=74 vs. 137, p<0.001) but not breathlessness (n=90 vs. 92, p=0.527). The observed frequencies were not different from expected for Borg CR10 ratings ≤5 (all p>0.05). In conclusion, a response bias away from Borg CR10 scale values of 6 and 8 without verbal descriptions exists for intensity ratings of breathlessness and leg discomfort at the symptom-limited peak of CPET in older adults.
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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 | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".