Facial Nerve Palsy Amid the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic: A Pooled Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Importance Idiopathic facial nerve palsy (FNP) has devastating sequelae and is potentially linked to coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Objective The rate of FNP was compared in the pandemic versus pre-pandemic periods. Furthermore, the risk of FNP was estimated among the COVID-19 vaccinated group. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Setting An electronic search was conducted in 7 databases: Scopus, Web of Science core collection, PubMed, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, MEDLINE, Embase, and CINAHL. Participants English observational studies investigating an association between idiopathic FNP and COVID-19 or its vaccination were included, irrespective of patients’ demographics. Exposures COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccine. Main Outcome Measures Change in FNP incidence between the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods; risk of developing FNP in individuals vaccinated against COVID-19 compared to those who were unvaccinated against COVID-19. Results After excluding duplicates, the search yielded 906 related articles, of which 118 articles were included. The risk of FNP was statistically significantly higher during the COVID-19 pandemic than the pre-pandemic period (RR: 1.68, [95% CI: 1.16-2.43], P = .01). A nonsignificant increase in FNP risk was identified among COVID-19 vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals (overall OR: 1.07, [95% CI: 0.85-1.35], P = .55). Conclusions and Relevance A remarkable increase in FNP rates was identified during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic, which seemed unlikely to be attributed to COVID-19 vaccination.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".