Identifying patients with undetected gastro-oesophageal cancer in primary care: External validation of QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal).

Journal article

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the performance of QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) for predicting the risk of undiagnosed gastro-oesophageal cancer in an independent UK cohort of patients from general practice records. DESIGN: Open cohort study to validate QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) prediction model. Three hundred sixty-five practices from the United Kingdom contributing to The Health Improvement Network database. 2.1 million patients registered with a general practice surgery between 01 January 2000 and 30 June 2008, aged 30-84years (3.7 million person years) with 1766 gastro-oesophageal cancer cases. The outcome, gastro-oesophageal cancer was defined as incident diagnosis of gastro-oesophageal cancer during the 2years after study entry. RESULTS: The results from this independent and external validation of QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) demonstrated good performance data on a large cohort of general practice patients. QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) had very good discrimination with c-statistics of 0.93 and 0.94 for women and men respectively. QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) was well calibrated across all tenths of risk and over all age ranges with predicted risks closely matching observed risks. QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) explained 74.4% and 75.6% of the variation in men and women respectively. CONCLUSIONS: QCancer® (Gastro-Oesophageal) is a useful tool to identify undiagnosed gastro-oesophageal cancer in primary care in the United Kingdom.

Authors: Collins, G; Altman, D

• Publication status: Published
• Journal: European journal of cancer (Oxford, England : 1990)
• Volume: 49
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1040-1048
• Publication date: 2013-03-01
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejca.2012.10.023
• EISSN: 1879-0852
• ISSN: 0959-8049
• Language: English
• Keywords: Aged; Prognosis; Delayed Diagnosis; Risk; Humans; Cohort Studies; General Practice; Incidence; Predictive Value of Tests; Esophageal Neoplasms; Stomach Neoplasms; Primary Health Care; Adult; Early Detection of Cancer; Middle Aged; Diagnostic Errors; Great Britain