Table 3.

Table of characteristics of included quantitative studies of health professionals’ perceptions of lung cancer

Study	Design (Level of evidence)	Health professionals	Study factors/Patient groups	Outcomes	Comments and quality
Jennens 2004, Australia	Cross sectional	All Australian general, pulmonary and palliative care physicians, medical and radiation oncologists and thoracic surgeons (N = 1325) who saw at least one patient a year with metastatic lung cancer	Pessimism regarding the use of platinum based chemotherapy for stage IV NSCLC	Referrals for chemotherapy for stage IV NSCLC	Referrals to chemotherapy is included as part of the measure of pessimism
	Mailed self report survey (Level IV)	N = 544			Study quality
		Response rate = 51%			Subject selection 2
					Group comparability NA
					Participation rate 0
Schroen 2000, USA	Cross sectional	Members of American College of Chest Physicians self reportedly practising either pulmonary medicine or thoracic surgery and treating adult lung cancer patients	Nihilism – underestimation of survival rate for resected stage I NSCLC	Beliefs re survival benefit for chemotherapy for various stages of NSCLC and radiotherapy for resected disease	Considered gender, treatment volumes, date of medical training completion
	Mailed self report survey (Level IV)	Randomly selected			Thoracic surgeons and pulmonologists see patients early in their diagnosis and refer patients to medical and radiation oncologists
		Pulmonologists N = 594 (response rate = 50%)			Study quality
		Thoracic surgeons N = 416 (response rate = 52%)			Subject selection 0
					Group comparability 0
					Participation rate 0
Wassenaar 2007, Wisconsin USA	Cross sectional	All 1132 members of the American college of Physicians- Internal Medicine or the American College of Family Physicians in Wisconsin	Lung (NSCLC) vs breast cancer	Referrals to clinical oncologist	Physicians answering lung cancer questionnaire saw average 4.12 lung cancer patients/year.
	Mailed self report survey (Level IV)	Randomly allocated scenarios with lung or breast cancer patients, smokers or non smokers at stage 1B, M1 and end of life		Beliefs re survival benefits of chemotherapy for various cancer stages	Anticipated response rate at least 30%
		N = 672			Sample size chosen to detect differences of at least 25% in the response patterns between disease groups with 80% power for a two-sided significance level of 5%
		Response rate = 59.4%			Study quality
					Subject selection 1
					Group comparability 2
					Participation rate 0

NSCLC = Non small cell lung cancer: NA = Not applicable (only within individual correlations were reported so comparability of groups was not assessed).