Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Oncol. Dec 15, 2021; 13(12): 2149-2160
Published online Dec 15, 2021. doi: 10.4251/wjgo.v13.i12.2149
Hepatocellular carcinoma surveillance and quantile regression for determinants of underutilisation in at-risk Australian patients
Elizabeth SL Low, Ross Apostolov, Darren Wong, Sandra Lin, Numan Kutaiba, Josephine A Grace, Marie Sinclair
Elizabeth SL Low, Ross Apostolov, Darren Wong, Josephine A Grace, Marie Sinclair, Department of Gastroenterology and Liver Transplant Unit, Austin Health, Heidelberg 3084, Victoria, Australia
Ross Apostolov, Josephine A Grace, Marie Sinclair, Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Melbourne 3000, Victoria, Australia
Sandra Lin, Department of Radiology, Monash Health, Clayton 3168, Victoria, Australia
Numan Kutaiba, Department of Radiology, Austin Health, Heidelberg 3084, Victoria, Australia
Author contributions: Low ES, Apostolov R, Lin S and Kutaiba N directly designed and performed the study, with contribution from Sinclair M, Wong D and Grace J; Low ESL, Lin S and Wong D collated and analysed the data; Low ESL wrote the paper, with revisions and editing by all other listed authors.
Institutional review board statement: This study was approved by the Austin Health Research Ethics Committee (ID 19/114) and carried out in line with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007).
Informed consent statement: All study participants or their legal guardian provided informed written consent about personal and medical data collection prior to study enrolment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest or financial supports.
Data sharing statement: Patient consent was not obtained but the presented data are anonymised and risk of identification is low. No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Elizabeth SL Low, MBBS, Doctor, Department of Gastroenterology and Liver Transplant Unit, Austin Health, 145 Studley Road, Heidelberg 3084, Victoria, Australia. elizabeth_low312@hotmail.com
Received: April 16, 2021
Peer-review started: April 16, 2021
First decision: June 27, 2021
Revised: July 13, 2021
Accepted: September 19, 2021
Article in press: September 19, 2021
Published online: December 15, 2021
Processing time: 242 Days and 21 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: This study evaluated the uptake of liver cancer screening in a cohort of high-risk Australians, and found that on average, patients were up-to-date with their surveillance for 84.2% of the study time period. Certain factors, such as absence of cirrhosis, younger age, African ethnicity and a non-English speaking background were associated to varying degrees with lower time up-to-date with hepatocellular carcinoma screening.