For a study, researchers sought to understand that medical-legal action against persons believed to have missed the initial diagnosis may be taken if a chest lesion was discovered on imaging tests before a non-small cell lung cancer diagnosis was made. There weren’t many evidence-based methods available to assess the medical impact of the resulting delay. The essay proposes methods for calculating missed diagnoses’ medical burden and suggests additional research. The potential impact of the delay can occasionally be inferred from the various 5-year overall survival rates of the T status-associated cancer stage at each time point, provided that no nodal or metastatic disease is seen at the time of the definitive diagnosis. Relapse-free survival, the patient’s particular lung cancer subtype, the time since diagnosis, and their current state of health may all need to be taken into account. Any delay may affect results, cause mental distress, or make it more difficult for the patient to prepare, but it is unlikely to have a significant effect on health without altering T-status. It might be argued that nodal or metastatic involvement did not exist at the time of the missed diagnosis if these discoveries were made at the time of the definitive diagnosis. The use of more complex computations that took into account variations in spread risk based on the T-stage at each instant would be desirable. Big datasets were already helpful in these analyses for T to N-status correlations, although T to M-status correlations was less helpful.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1525730422000596
