The Effect of Study Design on the Reporting of Mortality Due to Colorectal Cancer in Adults with Mental Illness in Nova Scotia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Some studies suggest a higher case fatality from colorectal cancer (CRC) in psychiatric patients even though the incidence is no greater than in the general population. However, this finding is not universal and may be confounded by study design (for example, inception, compared with historical, cohort), mean cohort age, or delays in presentation with more advanced staging at diagnosis. We assessed how study design and cancer stage at presentation affected outcomes in psychiatric patients. METHODS: A retrospective historical cohort of CRC presentations was used comparing psychiatric patients with control subjects. Psychiatric status was defined by either health service use or psychotropic prescription, and outcomes by logistic or Cox proportional hazards regression. RESULTS: There were 3501 new presentations of CRC from 2001 to 2005. Psychiatric cases, as defined by in- or outpatient contacts, made up 15.9% (n = 558) of patients with CRC. There was no association between psychiatric status and stage at presentation, surgical intervention, or mortality after adjusting for confounders. There was a reduced likelihood of resection, an indicator of curative treatment, when on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or serotonin noradrenergic reuptake inhibitor (n = 194; AOR 0.54; 95% CI 0.30 to 0.97) or antipsychotics (n = 28; AOR 0.27; 95% CI 0.08 to 0.92). CONCLUSIONS: The association between psychiatric status and CRC may vary by study design and how psychiatric status is defined. These factors should be considered when interpreting any association between mental illness and cancer. As in studies of all-cause and cardiac mortality, historical cohorts of prevalent psychiatric cases may be less sensitive than inception cohorts of new patients, possibly because the excess of deaths is greatest within 7 years of initial presentation for a psychiatric disorder.
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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 | 0.087 | 0.175 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".