Gallstones as a predictor of elevated cardiovascular disease risk: A meta-analysis and meta-regression of over 7.4 million participants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Gallstone disease (GD) is a prevalent condition frequently encountered in surgical units worldwide. The objective of this comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis study was to examine the relationship between gallstones and the risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). METHODS: To conduct our study, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis. We gathered relevant studies from reputable databases, including Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Cochrane, Google Scholar, and Embase. The quality of the articles was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale checklist. To assess heterogeneity among the studies, we utilized statistical tests such as the Chi-square test, I² statistic, and forest plots. Meta-regression analysis considered variables such as the year of the study, study design, sample size, study quality assessment score, geographical region, average age of subjects, and follow-up duration. Additionally, we evaluated publication bias using Begg's and Egger's tests. RESULTS: Data from 22 studies conducted between 1985 and 2023 were analyzed. The combined number of participants across these studies was 7,496,303. The meta-analysis results revealed that individuals with GD had a higher risk of CVDs (Risk Ratio (RR): 1.29; 95% CI: 1.22-1.36; P < 0.001). Subgroup analysis showed consistent results across good quality studies (RR: 1.20, 95% CI: 11.12-1.28; P < 0.001), moderate quality studies (RR: 1.41, 95% CI: 1.15-1.74; P < 0.001), and low-quality studies (RR: 1.22, 95% CI: 1.15-1.30; P < 0.001). In the meta-regression analysis, none of the variables had a significant relationship with the observed heterogeneity (P-value > 0.10). In a sensitivity analysis, the estimated RR remained consistent, confirming the robustness of the meta-analysis results. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest an association between gallstone disease and an increased risk of CVDs. It seems that one of the important factors of this relationship is having common causes for the formation of gallstones and cardiovascular diseases. However, gallstones can be considered an important sign of increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".