Practices and perceptions around splitting of carbidopa/levodopa tablets: a survey of patients and neurologists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Carbidopa/levodopa (CD/LD) remains the primary treatment for Parkinson's disease (PD) motor control symptoms. With progressing disease, for better symptom management, patients often split immediate-release CD/LD tablets-research on this practice is limited. OBJECTIVE: Survey patients with PD/caregivers, and neurologists on CD/LD pill-splitting practices and motor complications' impact on quality of life (QoL). METHODS: We surveyed 101 patients/caregivers and 120 neurologists. RESULTS: All agreed that motor control symptoms substantially affect QoL, particularly as PD progresses. 47% of patients surveyed halved immediate-release CD/LD tablets, and 27% fragmenting them further, with 27% and 18% finding it easy and accurate, respectively. Pill splitters reported longer disease duration, more advanced PD, worse motor fluctuations/dyskinesia control, and QoL. Neurologists reported dissatisfaction with CD/LD treatments for advanced disease, noting 44.9% of patients split tablets with, and 21.9% without, physician recommendation. CONCLUSIONS: Pill splitting is common but burdensome and imprecise. Further research is needed to evaluate clinical impact.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".