<b>Is “stiff-person syndrome” really autoimmune?</b>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When French Canadian Singer Céline Dion went on her Taking Chances World Tour (2008-9), which included nine shows across five cities in South Africa, as well as performances in Dubai, Tokyo, Osaka, Macau, Seoul, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur (Malasia) and 4 performances in Latin America ˗ she was taking way more “chances” in contracting serious infectious disease then she or her handlers might have predicted. Read more about this possibility here: Although its true cause is unknown, Stiff-Person Syndrome (SPS) is considered to be autoimmune, one of the ever-growing list of what now constitutes, according to The National Institutes of Health, more than 80 “autoimmune” diseases. However since SPS remains largely a clinical diagnosis, whose signs and symptoms are non-specific, and mimicked by other disease, its inclusion into autoimmunity has been questioned. Yehuda Shoenfeld’s Infection and Autoimmunity long ago came to the conclusion that all autoimmune diseases were infectious until proven otherwise. Infections themselves are important environmental triggers of autoimmunity, its onset and its severity. Therefore, before a disease can be proclaimed Autoimmune, exhaustive studies must be performed to carefully rule-out infectious disease. The association between immune response to certain mycobacterial infections and autoimmune disease, according to Shoenfeld, has long been suspected. However, a review of the literature shows that this possibility is not being ruled-out, in most cases, by anything beyond a mere acid-fast smear. However, studies have shown that a CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) tubercular acid-fast bacillus (AFB) smear has poor sensitivity (10-15%). In the meantime, disease such as Whipple’s Disease, with its movement disorders, once itself thought to be autoimmune, was found to be caused by an organism related to Mycobacterium avium. Moreover, there is not a sign or symptom in the Stiff-person syndrome and its spectrum that is not found in the literature of neuromuscular phenomena as a result of Central Nervous System mycobacterial infection of the spine and midbrain.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
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".