Medical management of inflammatory bowel disease; patterns of infliximable use amongst Canadian gastroenterologists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The last decade has been characterized by an increase in the number of biological agents available to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).Infliximab was approved by Health Canada for the treatment of Crohn's disease (CD) in 2001 and for ulcerative colitis (UC) in 2006.However, little is known of physician's perceptions and practices in using infliximab.Objectives: To describe how Canadian gastroenterologists' use and perceptions of Infliximab to treat refractory inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and to identify factors which may influence a gastroenterologist's decision to initiate Infliximab therapy.Methods: A postal questionnaire was distributed to all practicing clinicians captured in the 2007 membership of the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology (CAG).Each physician was contacted up to a maximum of three times.Results: 336/466 responded (72%).Two hundred and ninety-two (63 percent) of respondents had completed questionnaires in full.80 percent indicated that IBD patients comprised less than 30% of their clinical practice.Most prescribed Infliximab at an initial dose of 5 mg per kilogram (97%), prescribed loading doses at 0, 2 and 6 weeks (88%), pre-medicated with corticosteroids (74%), administered maintenance infusions at 8 week intervals (89%), co-administered immunosuppressive agents (81%) and continued Infliximab "indefinitely", as long as effective and well tolerated (76%).Most (> 70 percent) gastroenterologists identified lack of insurance coverage and provincial funding criteria as important barriers to prescribing Infliximab.Conclusions: Most Canadian gastroenterologists exhibit similar practice patterns with respect to the use of Infliximab for induction and maintenance therapy of IBD.Common barriers were identified with respect to the initiation of Infliximab therapy.iii
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".