The Prospective Dutch Colorectal Cancer (PLCRC) cohort: real-world data facilitating research and clinical care

Real-world data (RWD) sources are important to advance clinical oncology research and evaluate treatments in daily practice. Since 2013, the Prospective Dutch Colorectal Cancer (PLCRC) cohort, linked to the Netherlands Cancer Registry, serves as an infrastructure for scientific research collecting additional patient-reported outcomes (PRO) and biospecimens. Here we report on cohort developments and investigate to what extent PLCRC reflects the “real-world”. Clinical and demographic characteristics of PLCRC participants were compared with the general Dutch CRC population (n = 74,692, Dutch-ref). To study representativeness, standardized differences between PLCRC and Dutch-ref were calculated, and logistic regression models were evaluated on their ability to distinguish cohort participants from the Dutch-ref (AU-ROC 0.5 = preferred, implying participation independent of patient characteristics). Stratified analyses by stage and time-period (2013–2016 and 2017–Aug 2019) were performed to study the evolution towards RWD. In August 2019, 5744 patients were enrolled. Enrollment increased steeply, from 129 participants (1 hospital) in 2013 to 2136 (50 of 75 Dutch hospitals) in 2018. Low AU-ROC (0.65, 95% CI: 0.64–0.65) indicates limited ability to distinguish cohort participants from the Dutch-ref. Characteristics that remained imbalanced in the period 2017–Aug’19 compared with the Dutch-ref were age (65.0 years in PLCRC, 69.3 in the Dutch-ref) and tumor stage (40% stage-III in PLCRC, 30% in the Dutch-ref). PLCRC approaches to represent the Dutch CRC population and will ultimately meet the current demand for high-quality RWD. Efforts are ongoing to improve multidisciplinary recruitment which will further enhance PLCRC’s representativeness and its contribution to a learning healthcare system

Media Choices for Specialized News

Examines preferred media sources for four categories of special news--medicine, science, business, and consumer economics. Found that respondents ranked the media in the following order as preferred sources of specialized news: (1) local television affiliates, (2) local newspapers, (3) magazines, (4) radio, (5) cable networks, and (6) national newspapers

International Development, Anthropology in

The direct involvement of anthropologists in international development ebbs and flows, while ethnographic researchers consistently offer a critique of aid, especially the damage it causes. Anthropologists' navigation of the ethics, pressures, and contradictions of aid has in common with all development professionals an increasing preoccupation with managerialism and a focus on representation, funding, planning, and audit. They stand with fewer allies in their aim to amplify the diverse voices of those on the periphery. The pessimism and critical mode of anthropological research on international development is explained through ethnographic examples organized around key development themes of poverty, technology, rights, governance, security, and empowerment. Anthropologists continue to offer a distinctive perspective: wary of reductive generalization and attentive to specific context (time and place); empirical, historical, and reflexive; and interweaving attention to method with theory in their interpretations. The institutional exigencies and power hierarchies that they understand intimately, but struggle to overturn, limit their impact