Knowledge and perceptions of genetic testing for patients with breast cancer in Nigeria: a survey of healthcare providers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The role of genetics in breast cancer management is becoming increasingly essential in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Harmonized Guidelines by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) for SSA outline the subset of patients requiring genetic testing for hereditary breast cancer as part of their treatment plan. However, in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) like Nigeria, access to genetic counselling and testing remains limited. Additionally, the knowledge and acceptability of these available services from the healthcare provider (HCP) perspective are largely unknown. This study aimed to assess the knowledge and perceptions of hereditary breast cancer testing among HCPs in Nigeria. METHODS: In June 2022, we conducted a survey among 549 Nigerian HCPs. The 35-item survey was administered using Google Forms and distributed via WhatsApp. The survey collected demographic data and included three sections on genetic testing in breast cancer patients, focusing on knowledge, perceptions, and training. RESULTS: The results were analyzed using R Version 4.4.1 (R Core Team). Altogether 121 HCPs responded (22% response rate): 54 (44.6%) general surgeons, 4 (3.3%) breast surgical oncologists, 29 (24.0%) clinical and radiation oncologists, 31(25.6%) oncology nurses, and 3 (2.5%) breast radiologists. The survey results indicate that Nigerian HCPs were knowledgeable about hereditary breast cancer genetics, but the implementation of counselling and testing was low. Only 32.2% of respondents had requested genetic testing for their patients, and all testing was done through private laboratories. Only 9.9% had received formal clinical genetics training, and 13.2% reported having a genetic counsellor in their hospital. There was considerable interest in future genetics training programs using in person and online teaching modalities. CONCLUSION: This survey highlights the need for specialized breast cancer genetic training tailored for Nigerian HCPs, which is essential in achieving breast cancer treatment parity. Addressing the substantial challenges in expanding genetic testing capacity in Nigeria is warranted for future progress.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".