Cancer patients’ acceptability of incorporating an epidemiology questionnaire within a clinical trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND/AIMS: Understanding the influence or impact of epidemiological factors on cancer outcomes in clinical trials can broaden our knowledge of disease, trial populations and therapeutic effects thus leading to improved patient care. However, there is a lack of data on cancer patients' compliance with an epidemiology questionnaire in the context of a clinical trial. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Cancer patients were provided with a hypothetical scenario and surveyed regarding their willingness and preferences to complete an epidemiology questionnaire if incorporated into a cancer therapy trial. Patient compliance with completing a voluntary epidemiology questionnaire and trial coordinators perceptions therein were separately determined in the NCIC Clinical Trials Group HN.6 clinical trial, an ongoing randomized phase III trial comparing two first-line treatment regimens in patients with locoregionally advanced head and neck cancer. RESULTS: Of 617 cancer patients from community, academic and tertiary cancer centres, the majority were willing to complete an epidemiology questionnaire either unconditionally (45%), or provided it did not inconvenience them (31%); 4% would refuse. Patients preferred shorter questionnaires of 30-50 questions requiring 10-20 min to complete, administered over 1-3 sessions. Patients were less willing, but still compliant, to answer questions relating to sexual history (71%) and annual household income (66%) relative to other questions (>90%). Eighteen percent thought that the questionnaire should be mandatory, with 31% believing that they may benefit personally from such research. In the HN.6 trial, compliance averaged 94.8% per question. CONCLUSIONS: Cancer patients are very willing to complete epidemiology questions in clinical trials.
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 | 0.070 | 0.196 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".