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Record W4410051880 · doi:10.1016/j.jcpo.2025.100594

Health Canada reporting on quality of life for oncology drugs

2025· article· en· W4410051880 on OpenAlexaffabout
Joel Lexchin

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Cancer Policy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicCancer survivorship and care
Canadian institutionsYork UniversityUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedicineCancer drugsQuality (philosophy)BusinessQuality of life (healthcare)Family medicineIntensive care medicinePharmacologyNursingDrug

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Quality of Life (QoL) information regarding oncology drugs is important for patients, especially those who are receiving treatment for symptom control and not for curative purposes. Health Canada guidance documents do not describe how QoL information should be reported. This study examines how Health Canada reports QoL in documents regarding the decision to approve and indications for new oncology drugs. A list of all oncology drugs approved by Health Canada from 2019 to 2023 was created using a Health Canada website. Documents describing why a decision was made to approve a new drug and how QoL influences indications for the drug were searched for the term “Quality of Life” and relevant passages were recorded verbatim. Health Canada approved 60 oncology drugs. QoL only influenced approval in 1 case and was only mentioned in a drug’s indication in 3 cases. Health Canada only reports QoL information very infrequently for oncology drugs. • Quality of Life (QoL) measures for new oncology drugs are important for patients. • Health Canada reported how QoL influenced oncology approvals in 1 out of 60 drugs. • Health Canada reported on QoL indications in 3 out of 60 drugs. • Other regulatory authorities report on QoL more frequently than Health Canada.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.009
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.078
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Reporting · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.991
Threshold uncertainty score0.241

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0090.078
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0060.014
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.059
GPT teacher head0.481
Teacher spread0.422 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
DomainReporting
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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