The presenting symptom signatures of incident cancer: evidence from the English 2018 National Cancer Diagnosis Audit

BACKGROUND: Understanding relationships between presenting symptoms and subsequently diagnosed cancers can inform symptom awareness campaigns and investigation strategies. METHODS: We used English National Cancer Diagnosis Audit 2018 data for 55,122 newly diagnosed patients, and examined the relative frequency of presenting symptoms by cancer site, and of cancer sites by presenting symptom. RESULTS: Among 38 cancer sites (16 cancer groups), three classes were apparent: cancers with a dominant single presenting symptom (e.g. melanoma); cancers with diverse presenting symptoms (e.g. pancreatic); and cancers that are often asymptomatically detected (e.g. chronic lymphocytic leukaemia). Among 83 symptoms (13 symptom groups), two classes were apparent: symptoms chiefly relating to cancers of the same body system (e.g. certain respiratory symptoms mostly relating to respiratory cancers); and symptoms with a diverse cancer site case-mix (e.g. fatigue). The cancer site case-mix of certain symptoms varied by sex. CONCLUSION: We detailed associations between presenting symptoms and cancer sites in a large, representative population-based sample of cancer patients. The findings can guide choice of symptoms for inclusion in awareness campaigns, and diagnostic investigation strategies post-presentation when cancer is suspected. They can inform the updating of clinical practice recommendations for specialist referral encompassing a broader range of cancer sites per symptom

The presenting symptom signatures of incident cancer: evidence from the English 2018 National Cancer Diagnosis Audit

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer Nature via the DOI in this recordData availability: Data used in this study (National Cancer Diagnosis Audit data used in this study are available through application to NHS England Data Access Request Service (DARS).Code availability: All analysis was conducted using R (version 4.1.2) and can be accessed online at https://github.com/nadine-zakkak/presenting-symptom-signatures-of-incident-cancerBACKGROUND: Understanding relationships between presenting symptoms and subsequently diagnosed cancers can inform symptom awareness campaigns and investigation strategies. METHODS: We used English National Cancer Diagnosis Audit 2018 data for 55,122 newly diagnosed patients, and examined the relative frequency of presenting symptoms by cancer site, and of cancer sites by presenting symptom. RESULTS: Among 38 cancer sites (16 cancer groups), three classes were apparent: cancers with a dominant single presenting symptom (e.g. melanoma); cancers with diverse presenting symptoms (e.g. pancreatic); and cancers that are often asymptomatically detected (e.g. chronic lymphocytic leukaemia). Among 83 symptoms (13 symptom groups), two classes were apparent: symptoms chiefly relating to cancers of the same body system (e.g. certain respiratory symptoms mostly relating to respiratory cancers); and symptoms with a diverse cancer site case-mix (e.g. fatigue). The cancer site case-mix of certain symptoms varied by sex. CONCLUSION: We detailed associations between presenting symptoms and cancer sites in a large, representative population-based sample of cancer patients. The findings can guide choice of symptoms for inclusion in awareness campaigns, and diagnostic investigation strategies post-presentation when cancer is suspected. They can inform the updating of clinical practice recommendations for specialist referral encompassing a broader range of cancer sites per symptom.Cancer Research UKInternational Alliance for Cancer Early Detectio

Wolf–hunting dog interactions in a biodiversity hot spot area in northern greece: preliminary assessment and implications for conservation in the dadia-lefkimi-soufli forest national park and adjacent areas

Hunting dog depredation by wolves triggers retaliatory killing, with negative impacts on wildlife conservation. In the wider area of the Dadia-Lefkimi-Soufli Forest National Park, reports on such incidents have increased lately. To investigate this conflict, we interviewed 56 affected hunters, conducted wolf trophic analysis, analyzed trends for 2010–2020, applied MAXENT models for risk-map creation, and GLMs to explore factors related to depredation levels. Losses averaged approximately one dog per decade and hunter showing a positive trend, while livestock depredations showed a negative trend. Wolves preyed mainly on wild prey, with dogs consisting of 5.1% of the winter diet. Low altitude areas, with low to medium livestock availability favoring wolf prey and game species, were the riskiest. Dogs were more vulnerable during hare hunting and attacks more frequent during wolf post-weaning season or in wolf territories with reproduction. Hunter experience and group hunting reduced losses. Wolves avoided larger breeds or older dogs. Making noise or closely keeping dogs reduced attack severity. Protective dog vests, risk maps, and enhancing wolf natural prey availability are further measures to be considered, along with a proper verification system to confirm and effectively separate wolf attacks from wild boar attacks, which were also common. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Inference and Declaration of Independence in Task-Parallel Programs

Abstract. The inherent difficulty of thread-based shared-memory programming has recently motivated research in high-level, task-parallel programming models. Recent advances of Task-Parallel models add implicit synchronization, where the system automatically detects and satisfies data dependencies among spawned tasks. However, dynamic dependence analysis incurs significant runtime overheads, because the runtime must track task resources and use this information to schedule tasks while avoiding conflicts and races. We present SCOOP, a compiler that effectively integrates static and dynamic analysis in code generation. SCOOP combines context-sensitive points-to, controlflow, escape, and effect analyses to remove redundant dependence checks at runtime. Our static analysis can work in combination with existing dynamic analyses and task-parallel runtimes that use annotations to specify tasks and their memory footprints. We use our static dependence analysis to detect non-conflicting tasks and an existing dynamic analysis to handle the remaining dependencies. We evaluate the resulting hybrid dependence analysis on a set of task-parallel programs

Datasets for TACO - JIT Compilation on ARM

Dataset used for TACO paper. Results from running benchmark experiments