Prostate cancer screening practices amongst physicians in the North Simcoe Muskoka Local Health Integration Network.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening test is controversial and can result in both over-diagnosis and over-treatment. Recently, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care (CTFPHC) has recommended against routine screening for prostate cancer. We sought to determine how the CTFPHC has impacted the practice patterns among family physicians in the North Simcoe Muskoka (NSM) Local Health Integration Network (LHIN). MATERIALS AND METHODS: We surveyed all 439 family physicians within the NSM LHIN as well as 21 residents of the Family Medical Teaching Unit. Surveys were distributed by either mail or fax. Questions covered three sections: 1) demographics, 2) screening practice, and 3) perceptions of screening efficacy. RESULTS: The overall survey response rate was 33.3%. In all, 39.5% of physicians felt that prostate cancer screening did not provide a survival benefit, and 13.1% did not offer PSA screening. These beliefs were more likely to be held by younger physicians (age < 45), and those with < 10 years of practice (p < 0.05). Interestingly, female physicians were less likely to believe that PSA screening provided a survival benefit (p ≤ 0.01); however, no gender bias for PSA screening practices was observed (p = 0.73). Of the physicians who agreed with CTFPHC's recommendation (31.8%), 6.0% do not offer PSA screening because of the recommendation. The CTFPHC recommendation had no impact on the age at which physicians begin or stop offering PSA screening (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Despite the CTFPHC recommendations, prostate cancer screening remains controversial. Practice patterns amongst general practitioners in the NSM LHIN vary considerably, but seem to have been minimally impacted.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".