Patient‐reported ‘ever had’ and ‘current’ long‐term physical symptoms after prostate cancer treatments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To investigate the prevalence of physical symptoms that were 'ever' and 'currently' experienced by survivors of prostate cancer at a population level, to assess burden and thus inform policy to support survivors. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The study included 3 348 men surviving prostate cancer for 2-18 years after diagnosis. A cross-sectional, postal survey of 6 559 survivors diagnosed 2-18 years ago with primary, invasive prostate cancer (ICD10-C61) identified via national, population-based cancer registries in Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland. Questions included symptoms at diagnosis, primary treatments and physical symptoms (erectile dysfunction [ED]/urinary incontinence [UI]/bowel problems/breast changes/loss of libido/hot flashes/fatigue) experienced 'ever' and at questionnaire completion ('current'). Symptom proportions were weighted by age, country and time since diagnosis. Bonferroni corrections were applied for multiple comparisons. RESULTS: Adjusted response rate 54%; 75% reported at least one 'current' physical symptom ('ever' 90%), with 29% reporting at least three. Prevalence varied by treatment. Overall, 57% reported current ED and this was highest after radical prostatectomy (RP, 76%) followed by external beam radiotherapy with concurrent hormone therapy (HT, 64%). UI (overall 'current' 16%) was highest after RP ('current' 28%; 'ever' 70%). While 42% of brachytherapy patients reported no 'current' symptoms, 43% reported 'current' ED and 8% 'current' UI. 'Current' hot flashes (41%), breast changes (18%) and fatigue (28%) were reported more often by patients on HT. CONCLUSION: Symptoms after prostate cancer treatment are common, often multiple, persist long-term and vary by treatment method. They represent a significant health burden. An estimated 1.6% of men aged >45 years are survivors of prostate cancer and currently experiencing an adverse physical symptom. Recognition and treatment of physical symptoms should be prioritised in patient follow-up. This information should facilitate men and clinicians when deciding about treatment as differences in survival between radical treatments is minimal.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".