Fertility in a prospective Canadian cohort of women in the welding and electrical trades
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To determine the effects of work exposures on fertility in tradeswomen. METHODS: Women apprenticed in welding and electrical trades across Canada were recruited (2011-2017) to a prospective cohort and contacted every 6 months for up to 5 years. At each contact, participants provided information on conceptions, sexual activity, birth control and pregnancy attempts. Occupational exposures to ergonomic factors and, for welders, to metals and dust in welding fume were estimated from task-specific questionnaires. The OR of clinical infertility for work in welding was estimated. Time ratios (TR), relative times to conception, were estimated for first pregnancy in an accelerated failure time (AFT) regression with a log normal distribution of the hazard, to assess the relation of exposure to conception. RESULTS: 885 women were recruited, 447 in welding and 438 in electrical trades. 96 reported a period of clinical infertility (prevalence 10.8%) with 70/96 infertile since joining the trade. There was no excess in welders (OR=0.81 95% CI 0.49 to 1.33). 372 women were nulliparous and met selection criteria for further analysis. In the final multivariable model for welders, TR was increased with working >8 days without a rest day (TR=3.06 95% CI 1.03 to 9.05), reporting hand-arm vibration for >1 h/day (TR=3.06 95% CI 1.13 to 8.34) and with increasing aluminium exposure (TR=1.38 95% CI 1.05 to 1.80). Among electrical workers, TR was increased in those working above shoulder height for ≥2 h/day (TR=1.88 95% CI 1.19 to 2.97). CONCLUSION: Work in welding did not increase the risk of clinical infertility, but time to first pregnancy reflected preventable work exposures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".