Article Text
Abstract
Objectives Harms of screening are generally not well reported. Harms of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening may include negative psychosocial consequences from the attention being drawn to disease through the screening invitation, the screening procedure itself and from fear of the screening result. Hence, it is important to measure psychosocial consequences before and after invitation to screening, at screening and after screening. Moreover, measurement of psychosocial consequences in cancer screening settings should be performed using questionnaires with high content validity and adequate measurement properties. Despite this fact, few CRC screening studies investigating psychosocial consequences have performed a baseline measurement before and after invitation to screening in both a screening and a control cohort. Moreover, none of the studies has used a questionnaire with high content validity and adequate measurement properties.
Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the psychosocial consequences of invitation to CRC screening in a Danish CRC screening naïve cohort using a condition-specific questionnaire validated with Item Response Theory Rasch Models.
Method A random sample of 1000 screening invitees scheduled for screening in March 2017 was matched with 1000 control persons scheduled for screening in November and December 2017. We sent a questionnaire to both study groups five weeks prior to the invitation of the invitees and another questionnaire to both groups three days after the invitees’ screening invitations were sent by post.
The primary outcome was psychosocial status, measured with the condition-specific questionnaire Consequences of Screening for CRC (COS-CRC).
We analysed the mean COS-CRC score at each measurement for each COS-CRC scale compared between the study groups using multivariable regression models, adjusting for potential confounders. We adjusted for differential non-response by weighting the observations that were available at the follow-up measurement by the inverse of the probability of not being missing. We also adjusted for repeated measures and weighting. To allow for multiple testing, a p-value <0.01 was considered significant.
Results Results and conclusions will be presented at the conference.
Conclusions Results and conclusions will be presented at the conference.