Occupational exposure to silica and risk of heart disease: a systematic review with meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective To search for evidence of the relationship between occupational silica exposure and heart disease. Design A systematic review and meta-analysis. Background Growing evidences suggest a connection between occupational silica exposure and heart disease; however, the link between them is less clear. Data sources PubMed, ScienceDirect, Springer and EMBASE were searched for articles published between 1 January 1995 and 20 June 2019. Articles that investigated the effects of occupational silica exposure on heart disease risk were considered. Study selection We included cohort studies, including prospective, retrospective and retro-prospective studies. Data extraction and synthesis We extracted data by using a piloted data collection form and conducted random-effects meta-analysis and exposure-response analyses. The meta-relative risk (meta-RR), a measure of the average ratio of heart disease rates for those with and without silica exposure, was used as an inverse variance-weighted average of relative risks from the individual studies. The Newcastle-Ottawa Quality assessment Scale about cohort studies was used for study quality assessment. Outcome measure We calculated heart disease risks of pulmonary heart disease, ischaemic heart disease and other heart diseases. Results Twenty cohort articles were included. Results suggest a significant increase of overall heart disease risk (meta-RR = 1.08, 95% CI = 1.03, 1.13). Stronger evidences of association with pulmonary heart disease were found through both categories of heart disease risk estimate (meta-RR = 1.24, 95% CI = 1.08, 1.43) and exposure-response analyses (meta-RR = 1.39, 95% CI = 1.19, 1.62). Moreover, our subgroup analyses revealed that the statistical heterogeneity among studies could be attributed mainly to the diversities of reference group, occupation and study quality score. Conclusions Silica-exposed workers have increased risk of overall heart disease, especially pulmonary heart disease. While further research is needed to better clarify the relationship between occupational silica exposure and ischaemic heart disease.
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 | 0.017 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.029 | 0.044 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| 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".