Urologist Referral Delay and Its Impact on Survival after Radical Cystectomy for Bladder Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Evidence shows that wait times before bladder cancer surgery have been increasing, and wait time can negatively affect survival. We aimed to determine if a long delay caused by an indirect referral before a first urologist visit affects the survival of patients undergoing radical cystectomy for bladder cancer. METHODS: We analyzed data from 1271 patients who underwent surgery for bladder cancer during the decade 2000-2009. The cohort was obtained by linking two administrative databases in the province of Quebec. Patients were considered to have been directly referred to a urologist if they had 5 or fewer visits with a general practitioner before their first urologist visit; otherwise, they were considered to have been indirectly referred. The effect on survival after surgery of a longer delay before a first urologist visit was assessed using Cox regression models. RESULTS: Median referral delay for the study population was 30 days (56 days for women, 23 days for men; p < 0.0001). Indirect referral was observed for 49% of women and 33% of men. Compared with patients who were directly referred, those who were indirectly referred after first symptoms of bladder cancer experienced poorer survival (hazard ratio: 1.29; 95% confidence interval: 1.10 to 1.52). Women who were indirectly referred had a significant 47% greater risk of death after radical cystectomy. Men who were indirectly referred also experienced decreased survival (adjusted hazard ratio: 1.25; 95% confidence interval: 1.03 to 1.51). CONCLUSIONS: Patients indirectly referred to a urologist had an increased risk of mortality after surgery. Compared with men, women had longer wait times and poorer survival.
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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".