A multicenter, phase IV study of the effectiveness of palliative gemcitabine in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
46 Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have shown that palliative gemcitabine provides clinical benefit and prolongs survival in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. The purpose of this study was to determine if the efficacy of palliative gemcitabine demonstrated in RCTs has translated into effectiveness in routine clinical practice in Ontario. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of all patients with exocrine cancer of the pancreas treated with first line, single agent, palliative gemcitabine at all 13 provincial cancer centres in Ontario between 2008 and 2011. These patients were identified by linking electronic records of treatment from all cancer centres and hospitals in Ontario to the Ontario Cancer Registry. Patient-reported well-being and symptoms were captured by the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System, which has been in routine use at these centres since 2008. The effectiveness of gemcitabine was measured in terms of clinical benefit at two months and overall survival. Patients were classified as having achieved clinical benefit if they had not discontinued gemcitabine and their self-reported well-being was stable or improved at two months. Results: The study population included 423 patients. Their median age was 65 and 50% were women. Fifty-seven percent had stage IV disease, 17% had stage III disease, and 10% had recurrence after earlier treatment for stage I or II disease. Patients included in this study were older than, but otherwise similar to, patients enrolled in four relevant RCTs that used gemcitabine in the experimental or control arm. At two months, 36.9% (95% CI 29.6-44.2%) of patients in this study achieved clinical benefit, which was within the range of 24% to 56% observed in patients in these trials. Median overall survival was 5.7 months (95% CI 4.7-6.1), which was within the range of 5.4 to 6.9 months reported in the trials. Conclusions: The efficacy of gemcitabine demonstrated in RCTs has translated into effectiveness in routine clinical practice in Ontario. The approach described above could readily be used to study the effectiveness of other palliative interventions.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".