Predictors of Colorectal Cancer Screening: A Comparison of Men and Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: New Canadian guidelines recommend screening average-risk adults to reduce mortality from colorectal cancer, the second most common cause of cancer death among Canadians. The present study examined the self-reported prevalence of colorectal cancer testing and sex-specific predictors of having had a fecal occult blood (FOB) test for screening, among a cohort of Alberta residents aged 50 to 69 years. METHODS: Subjects (n=5009) enrolled in a geographically based cohort study completed a Health and Lifestyle Questionnaire between October 2000 and June 2002 that ascertained their colorectal cancer detection practices, as well as demographic and other health and lifestyle characteristics. RESULTS: Patterns of FOB testing, and sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy, were similar for men and women. The majority of subjects (83.3%) reported no first-degree family history of colorectal cancer or bowel conditions, and they were considered to be at average risk. Few average-risk subjects reported having a screening FOB test within the past two years (7.7% [95% CI 6.7% to 8.7%] of subjects aged 50 to 59 years and 12.5% [95% CI 10.9% to 14.3%] of subjects aged 60 to 69 years). In men, the strongest predictors of having a screening FOB test in the past two years were a recent history of prostate-specific antigen testing and educational attainment. Among women, the strongest predictors were a recent history of having had a Pap test, a recent mammogram, employment status and educational attainment. CONCLUSIONS: Screening for colorectal cancer in average-risk adults was infrequent in this sample and lagged behind screening for other cancers. Screening of average-risk adults occurred primarily in people already accessing the health care system, suggesting that public education programs will be required to increase screening rates.
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 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".