Neonatal phototherapy and cancer risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective To evaluate the risk of cancer after phototherapy for neonatal hyperbilirubinemia. Study design This was a systematic review and meta-analysis. Electronic databases, including PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library, were searched. Prospective and retrospective studies, case series, and review studies published between 1970 and 2025 were included. Studies underwent two stages of screening. The first phase was title and abstract screening. The second phase was a full-text review of studies deemed to meet the inclusion criteria. Risk of bias was assessed using ROBINS-E. Inverse-variance weighted multi-level random effects models were used for all analyses. Results This systematic review and meta-analysis included 15 studies. Risk of bias was low in eight studies, one study was judged to have some concerns, and six studies were determined to have a high risk of bias. A total of 6,675,265 patient data points were included. Studies ranged from 1995–2022, with an age group from 35 weeks to 31 years old. Overall, there was an estimated 24% increased odds of cancer for those who received phototherapy compared to those who did not [OR = 1.24; 95% CI: (1.12, 1.36); p < 0.001]. Conclusions Phototherapy for neonatal hyperbilirubinemia was associated with a small increased risk of cancer up to age 31 years. This association must be balanced by the well-understood risk of Bilirubin-Induced Neurologic Dysfunction.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".