Seasonal patterns in Bell's palsy: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Bell's palsy (BP) is an idiopathic condition affecting the seventh cranial nerve, causing unilateral facial muscle paralysis. Conflicting reports exist on the impact of seasonal variations on BP, and limited systematic reviews have been conducted. In this study, a systematic review and meta-analysis of the BP literature was performed to assess the association between BP and the four seasons. Methods In accordance with PRISMA guidelines, a systematic search was performed using the PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science databases to identify cohort studies reporting seasonal cases of idiopathic BP. Study quality and risk of bias were assessed via the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale (NOS). The associations between seasonal variations and the occurrence of BP were analyzed via a random effects model. Results Eight cohort studies involving 3,363 BP patients were included, with a slight male predominance (51.5%). The pooled mean age was 44.72 ± 19.6 years. Pooled proportions for each season were determined via subgroup analysis. Winter proportions were the highest at 0.27 (95% CI: 0.24–0.31; I 2 = 65.6%, p = 0.0048), followed by autumn at 0.26 (95% CI: 0.23–0.29; I 2 = 59.3%, p = 0.0161). The spring proportion was 0.24 (95% CI: 0.20–0.27; I 2 = 68.1%, p = 0.0026), whereas the summer proportion was 0.22 (95% CI: 0.19–0.25; I 2 = 61.5%, p = 0.0111). The test for subgroup differences showed (χ 2 = 6.62, p = 0.0850). Conclusion BP cases were more common during colder months than during warmer months. Although no statistically significant association was found, this highlights the need for further studies across diverse climatic regions to clarify potential seasonal influences. Systematic review registration https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/view/CRD42024623519 , identifier: CRD42024623519.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".