Assessing the clinical, humanistic, and economic impact of early cancer diagnosis: a systematic literature review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: There is a clear consensus among healthcare providers on the advantages of early cancer detection and treatment. However, no in-depth review has yet fully presented the clinical, humanistic, and economic benefits of early cancer diagnosis compared to late detection across a broad range of tumor types. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted to determine the clinical, humanistic, and economic benefits of early cancer diagnosis, as opposed to late diagnosis, as reported in non-interventional studies conducted worldwide. Searches were conducted using electronic databases (MEDLINE and Embase), conference repositories and grey literature. Observational studies in adults diagnosed with bladder cancer, gastric cancer, head and neck cancer (HNC), melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), renal-cell carcinoma (RCC), and triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) were eligible for inclusion if they reported survival, health-related quality of life (HRQoL), healthcare resource utilization and/or costs, according to stage at diagnosis. Identified records were screened and extracted by two independent reviewers, and discrepancies were resolved by a third reviewer. The quality of studies was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale and the Larg and Moss adapted checklist. Results: Of the 3,159 records identified, 103 studies were included in this review. The general trend showed worse clinical, humanistic, and economic outcomes when patients were diagnosed at a later stage compared to an earlier stage. Patients diagnosed at an earlier stage, had on average, substantially higher survival rates and lower mortality rates across all cancer types and incurred lower resource utilization and costs (with available evidence for patients with NSCLC, TNBC, and HNC), compared to those diagnosed at a more advanced/later stage. Limited evidence on the humanistic burden suggested that with a more advanced stage at diagnosis, patients with bladder cancer experienced reduced HRQoL. Conclusion: Early cancer diagnosis (i.e., cancer diagnosed at earlier stages or with lower grades) was associated with longer survival, improved quality of life and lower healthcare costs and resource utilization compared to diagnosis of cancer at later stages or higher grades, as reported by overall survival (OS) and HRQoL outcomes. These findings emphasize the importance of screening and early detection of cancer to improve outcomes among patients diagnosed with cancer.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".