Cost and availability of high-dose oral prednisone for management of optic neuritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective This study assesses the cost and availability of 1250 mg of oral prednisone for treatment of optic neuritis across pharmacies in Toronto. Design Prospective cross-sectional study Participants Data collected from 70 pharmacies, across 4 regions in Toronto, Ontario, Canada Methods Data were collected from 70 pharmacies on cost and availability for 3- and 5-day courses of prednisone. Pharmacist hesitancy was assessed on the basis of the readiness of the pharmacist to dispense the required dose of medication. Results The average cost for a 3-day course of prednisone was $29.10 CAD, and for a 5-day course was $40.40 CAD. Availability was lowest in independent pharmacies (23.8%) and highest in chain pharmacies (47.6%). Although no significant association between availability and pharmacy type was found (χ 2 [1; N = 63] = 3.66; p = 0.06), the direction of the effect still shows an indication of chain pharmacies having higher stock. Chain pharmacies also exhibited the highest cost variability. Finally, 40% of pharmacists had some hesitancy or refused to dispense the appropriate dose. Conclusions There is limited availability of high-dose prednisone across Toronto, with chain pharmacies offering the highest availability but at a higher cost. There is significant hesitancy about dispensing this prednisone dose among pharmacists. Clinicians should be aware of these trends when prescribing medication for optic neuritis. Neuro-ophthalmologists should aim to develop relationships with pharmacies to improve timely administration of this medication.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".