Association of systemic corticosteroids and clinical outcomes in children hospitalised with severe orbital infections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the association between corticosteroid use and clinical outcomes in children hospitalised with severe orbital infections, and to describe practice patterns of systemic corticosteroid use. DESIGN: Multi-site observational cohort study using hospital data from 2009 to 2018. SETTING: Canadian children's hospitals (7) and community hospitals (3). PATIENTS: Children 2 months and 18 years hospitalised with severe orbital infections. INTERVENTIONS: Systemic corticosteroids at any time MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Length of hospital stay and surgical intervention using time-to-event Cox proportional hazards multivariable regression models to account for potential differences in timing of corticosteroid use (early, ≤24 hours or late, >24 hours after admission), with adjustment for covariates. RESULTS: Of the 1479 hospitalised children, 876 (59.2%) were male and median age was 5.3 years (IQR 2.2 to 9.8). Of the 65 (4.4%) who received corticosteroids, over half (53.8%) received them early. Median length of stay was 75.9 hours (IQR 47.1 to 130.4) and 98 (6.6%) underwent surgical intervention. Corticosteroid use was associated with delayed discharge and prolonged hospitalisation, as reflected by a HR of 0.73 (95% CI 0.55 to 0.96) in adjusted analyses. However, systemic corticosteroids had no association with surgical intervention (HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.36 to 1.88). CONCLUSION: In a large cohort of hospitalised children with severe orbital infections, corticosteroids were used infrequently, and when used, were not associated with improved clinical outcomes. Further high-quality trial evidence is needed to determine if routine corticosteroids are safe and effective.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".