Associations between long-term air pollution exposure and the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A matched case-control study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is increasing evidence of an association between air pollution, particularly nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), and the development of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). However, investigation into sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) remains understudied. Also, empirical identification of confounding variables to adjust for in ALS environmental studies is largely absent. Thus, we created a multifactorial database, mapped hypothesized direct effects of air pollutants, and conducted a matched case-control study in New Brunswick, Canada to investigate the association between long-term exposure to various air pollutants and the development of ALS. Odds of ALS onset was significantly associated with increased SO 2 exposure (OR = 1.23; 95% CI: 1.02 – 1.47, per IQR increase of 0.14 ppb) in adjusted direct effect models, but not associated with exposure to NO 2 (OR = 1.09; 95% CI: 0.87 – 1.41, per IQR increase of 2.79 ppb), ozone (O 3 ) (OR = 0.99; 95% CI: 0.80 – 1.22, per IQR increase of 2.31 ppb), fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) (OR = 0.99; 95% CI: 0.80 – 1.23, per IQR increase of 0.52 μg/m 3 ) or PM 2.5(smoke) (OR = 1.05; 95% CI: 0.83 – 1.35, per IQR increase of 0.68 μg/m 3 ). As for recency models, SO 2 remained significantly associated with ALS in both 5-year (OR = 1.21; 95% CI: 1.03 – 1.43) and 10-year prior to onset sensitivity models (OR = 1.23; 95% CI: 1.02 – 1.47). Our findings support the association between long-term exposure to air pollutants, particularly SO 2 , and the development of ALS, supporting the need for improved air pollution control measures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".