Evidence Regarding Metachromatic Leukodystrophy Newborn Screening
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) is a lysosomal disorder affecting about 1 per 100,000 newborns. It is caused by biallelic variations in the arylsulfatase A (ARSA) gene, leading to deficiency of ARSA enzyme activity leading to elevation of sulfatides. Most affected individuals have the late-infantile or early-juvenile phenotype, associated with significant and progressive neurologic degeneration and death. For these phenotypes, treatment with a lentiviral gene therapy in infancy can improve survival and motor function. However, in the absence of screening or an affected older sibling, most cases are diagnosed much later. A two-tiered newborn screen, based on the presence of elevated sulfatides in dried-blood spots followed by finding low ARSA enzyme activity, can accurately identify newborns with the early-onset phenotypes of MLD for timely gene therapy. An MLD screening study with consent is ongoing in 8 hospitals in New York City and population-based newborn screening has been implemented in several regions in Europe. Although the false-positive rate is low, only one of these MLD newborn screening activities, in Hannover, Germany, has reported identifying cases. At least four newborn screening programs in the United States are in the process of implementing MLD screening.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.097 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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".