Reasons for delays in diagnosis of anal cancer and the effect on patient satisfaction.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To quantify the time to diagnosis of anal cancer after onset of symptoms, to identify reasons for delays in diagnosis, and to identify the effect of delays on patient satisfaction. DESIGN: Retrospective questionnaire. SETTING: Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, Alta. PARTICIPANTS: Patients newly diagnosed with anal cancer on their first visit to the centre. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Timeline from first symptoms to first access to medical care and to diagnosis, and patient satisfaction. RESULTS: Twenty-six patients completed the survey. Although most sought medical attention promptly, 19% waited for more than 6 months. At first visits after symptom onset, a rectal examination was performed in only 54% of patients, a diagnosis of hemorrhoids was given in 27% of patients, and further investigations were ordered in only 54% of patients. If a misdiagnosis of hemorrhoids was made, substantially more visits were required to diagnose the cancer. An average of 3.2 months after the first visit to a physician and 7.4 months after onset of symptoms was needed to obtain a diagnosis. Overall, 28% of patients believed there were no diagnostic delays and 40% of patients thought they were responsible for the delay. Overall, 72% of patients were satisfied with the care they received. Patients who were dissatisfied perceived the delay in diagnosis to be because no action was taken by a physician or the wait was too long for tests or referrals. CONCLUSION: To reduce delays in diagnosis, it might be important to educate relevant populations about symptoms of anal cancer. In addition, primary care physicians must maintain a high index of suspicion of anal cancer in high-risk populations. Finally, there must be a system-wide increase in access to further investigations through gastroenterologists and general surgeons.
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.
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 it