Figure 5.

The risk of being diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer as a function of time from referral to diagnosis. Estimated odds ratios of being diagnosed with advanced (distant or regional) vs localised colorectal cancer as a function of the length of the secondary care interval (time from referral to diagnosis) analysed for five cohorts (in total 8415 patients). We excluded patients with unknown tumour stage and adjusted for age, gender and alarm symptoms at first presentation. The grey dashed curves with 95% confidence limits are fitted on the combined data sets with grey spikes showing the distribution of the care intervals on a squared scale. The grey horizontal lines indicate the chosen reference point of 30 days. Crude estimates are not shown.