Skip to main content
PLOS One logoLink to PLOS One
. 2020 Aug 13;15(8):e0236836. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236836

Time-series cardiovascular risk factors and receipt of screening for breast, cervical, and colon cancer: The Guideline Advantage

Aixia Guo 1, Bettina F Drake 2, Yosef M Khan 3, James R Langabeer II 4, Randi E Foraker 1,5,*
Editor: Antonio Palazón-Bru6
PMCID: PMC7425922  PMID: 32790674

Abstract

Background

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Cancer screenings can detect precancerous cells and allow for earlier diagnosis and treatment. Our purpose was to better understand risk factors for cancer screenings and assess the effect of cancer screenings on changes of Cardiovascular health (CVH) measures before and after cancer screenings among patients.

Methods

We used The Guideline Advantage (TGA)—American Heart Association ambulatory quality clinical data registry of electronic health record data (n = 362,533 patients) to investigate associations between time-series CVH measures and receipt of breast, cervical, and colon cancer screenings. Long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks was employed to predict receipt of cancer screenings. We also compared the distributions of CVH factors between patients who received cancer screenings and those who did not. Finally, we examined and quantified changes in CVH measures among the screened and non-screened groups.

Results

Model performance was evaluated by the area under the receiver operator curve (AUROC): the average AUROC of 10 curves was 0.63 for breast, 0.70 for cervical, and 0.61 for colon cancer screening. Distribution comparison found that screened patients had a higher prevalence of poor CVH categories. CVH submetrics were improved for patients after cancer screenings.

Conclusion

Deep learning algorithm could be used to investigate the associations between time-series CVH measures and cancer screenings in an ambulatory population. Patients with more adverse CVH profiles tend to be screened for cancers, and cancer screening may also prompt favorable changes in CVH. Cancer screenings may increase patient CVH health, thus potentially decreasing burden of disease and costs for the health system (e.g., cardiovascular diseases and cancers).

Introduction

Cancer is the second leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States (US) [1]: breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women [2]; colorectal cancer ranks second among men and third among women [3]; while cervical cancer ranks as a major cause of cancer death among women [4]. Regular cancer screenings for breast, cervical, and colorectal cancers can help to diagnose cancers early and reduce cancer deaths [5]. For example, in the past 40 years, the number of deaths caused by cervical cancer has significantly decreased thanks to pap tests which can find abnormal cervical cells before they turn to cancer [6]. Similarly, colonoscopy removes non-cancerous colon polyps before becoming malignant. And regular mammography screening can identify breast cancer in an earlier, more treatable stage. Thus, breast cancer screening (BCS), cervical cancer screening (CECS), and colorectal cancer screening (COCS) are very important for early detection and treatment.

Factors associated with cancer screenings include: demographic factors, health insurance coverage, education level, smoking status, obesity, and cholesterol testing. For example, receipt of mammography is associated with modifiable factors such as weight, smoking, and other lifestyle factors [7–11]. Receipt of CECS is associated with healthier weight [12], lower cardiovascular disease occurrence [13], and lower cholesterol [14]. Some studies suggest that smoking, sedentary lifestyle, high body mass index, and high comorbidity are associated with a higher percentage of COCS participation [15–17]. Traditionally, data for such studies originate from questionnaires, claims data, and telephone surveys, and statistical analysis methods such as logistic regression models are applied to examine the associations between the risk factors and cancer screenings. Electronic health records (EHR) contain longitudinal healthcare information and data including diagnoses, medications, procedures, lab tests, and images [18] and therefore can be used to discover new patterns and relationships from the rich data. Deep learning algorithms have been widely and successfully used in bioinformatics and healthcare fields as they can effectively capture features and patterns in longitudinal data [19,20].

In this study, we investigated associations between longitudinal CVH risk factors and the receipt of cancer screenings using EHR data by the long short-term memory (LSTM) model [21]. We then studied the distribution of CVH factors between patients who did and did not receive cancer screenings to further investigate the associations. Finally, we compared measures of CVH longitudinally within those who did and did not receive screening to better understand the effect of cancer screenings on CVH measures.

Materials and methods

Ethics statement

All the data were fully anonymized before we accessed them. Our study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. We obtained a written acknowledgement of proprietary rights and non-disclosure and data use agreement from the American Heart Association (The Washington University_NDA_DUA_CONTRACTID 158065_2019.04.26_K).

Data source and study population

The Guideline Advantage (TGA) is a clinical data registry established in 2011 by the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association (AHA) [22]. EHR data has been collected from over 70 clinics across the US by the TGA to track and monitor disease management and outpatient preventative care [23]. We used longitudinal TGA data to predict three types of cancer screenings among 362,533 unique patients.

We used a 6-year range (2010–2015) to identify 777 female patients in the 40–69 year old age group who received BCS; 617 female patients in the 21–64 year old age group who received CECS; and 264 patients in the 50–75 year old age group who received COCS. If patients received multiple types of cancer screening, we only considered the first. Using the same criteria for gender and age, we randomly selected a comparison group of patients who did not receive cancer screenings: 8000 for BCS, 6000 for CECS, and 3000 for COCS.

We utilized the following CVH measures defined by the AHA: smoking status, body mass index (BMI), blood pressure (BP), hemoglobin A1c (A1C), and cholesterol (Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL) in our dataset). We then classified them into three categories: ideal, intermediate, or poor, according to Table 1. We utilized the Multum drug database [24] as a template to convert the drug names in our dataset to their corresponding drug classes. The Levenshtein distance algorithm [25] was employed for the conversion by comparing the drug names in our dataset to the Multum drug database template. The conversion was considered successful and medications were considered as treatments for BP, A1C, or LDL (Table 1) if the distance between the two compared strings was less than five. All CVH measurements prior to the date of cancer screening were considered in the analysis for those who received screening, and all CVH measurements in the data set were considered in the analysis for those who did not receive screening.

Table 1. Measures of CVH which are available in the TGA (Adapted from: Lloyd-Jones, 2011) [26].

Poor Health Intermediate Health Ideal Health
Health Behaviors
Smoking status Yes Former ≤ 12 months Never or quit > 12 months
Body mass index ≥ 30 kg/m2 25–29.9 kg/m2 < 25 kg/m2
Health Factors
LDL ≥ 160 mg/dL 130–159 mg/dL or treated to goal < 130 mg/dL
Blood pressure Systolic ≥ 140 mm Hg or Diastolic ≥ 90 mm Hg Systolic 120–139 mm Hg or Diastolic 80–89 mm Hg or treated to goal Systolic < 120 mm Hg
Diastolic < 80 mm Hg
Fasting plasma glucose ≥ 126 mg/dL 100–125 mg/dL or treated to goal < 100 mg/dL

For the primary analysis, we selected patients who had at least one measure of CVH: 725 for BCS, 565 for CECS, and 240 for COCS. In the comparison groups, there were available data for 8,000 BCS; 3,548 CECS; and 3,000 COCS.

Statistical analysis

We first studied the LSTM prediction of cancer screening from time-series CVH factors. We divided each CVH factor into its submetric of “ideal”, “intermediate”, or “poor” according to Table 1. For example, if a patient had a measure of “ideal” blood pressure, then that feature was called blood pressure ideal. All features were then embedded to a 32-dimensional vector space by word2vec [27] for each type of cancer screenings. The Python Genism Word2Vec model used the following hyperparameters: size (embedding dimension) was 32, window (the maximum distance between a target word and all words around it) was 5, min_count (the minimum number of words counted when training the model) was 1, sg (the training algorithm) was CBOW (the continuous bag of words). Time information for each measure was added and was calculated by the difference in days between each visit date and the most recent visit date. Thus, each feature was associated with its own time point in the unit of days.

The resulting embedded vectors and associated time points were fed to the LSTM model. Due to the comparison group being much larger than the number of patients with cancer screening, we randomly selected 800 patients for BCS, 600 patients for CECS, and 300 patients for COCS and repeated this process for 10 times to account for the imbalance between screened and unscreened groups. Each time, the data set for each type of cancer screening was split into a training data set (80%) and a test data set (20%). We trained the LSTM model on the training data and tested the trained model on the test data. We utilized the average of the area under the receiver operator curve (AUROC) to evaluate the performance of our LSTM model for each type of cancer evaluated.

Our LSTM model comprised an input layer, one hidden layer (with 100 dimensions) and an output layer. The hyperparameter used in the model was as follows: a sigmoid function was used as the activation function in the output layer. A binary cross-entropy was used as the loss function. Adam optimizer [28] was used to optimize the model with a mini-batch size of 64 samples.

We then investigated whether distributions of CVH–counts and percentages for each submetric–differed between patients who did and who did not receive cancer screenings by Chi-Squared test. Finally, we studied changes in CVH factors within screening group, for the same patients who received screening and for those who did not. Within screening group, we compared CVH measures from before and on the day of the screening to the CVH measures collected after the screening. For the patients who did not receive screening, we compared CVH measures before and after the mid-point of the visit dates. If patients only had a single visit, then they were not included in the before and after analysis. Analyses were conducted by using the libraries of Scikit-learn, Scipy, Matplotlib with Python, version 3.6.5 in 2019.

Results

The majority of our study population was white, with a mean of age of approximately 55 years for BCS, 50 years for CECS, and 60 years for COCS (Table 2). The non-white study population was predominantly African-American. The average number of measures (Avg #) among patients who received screening was higher than that of patients who were not screened. For example, the average number of BP measurements for patients with BCS was 11 (15 for CECS and 13 for COCS) compared to 8 for BCS (7 for CECS and 8 for COCS) for patients who were not screened.

Table 2. Characteristics [mean (SD) or n (%)] of the study population by receipt of cancer screening.

Cancer Screenings Yes No
BCS n = 725 n = 8000
Demographics
Age, mean (std) year 56 (8) 55 (10)
White race, n (%) 386 (53.3) 3875 (48.4)*
Non-White race, n (%) 136 (18.7) 1682 (21.0)
Unknown race, n (%) 203 (28.0) 2443 (30.5)
CVH factors mean (std), Avg # measures Avg # Avg #
A1C 7.1 (1.6) 4.3 114.3 (37.5) 3.4
LDL (mg/dL) 115.7 (37.1) 3.0 32.9 (8.6) 2.5
BMI (kg/m2) 32.7 (7.3) 9.8 127.4 (19.2) 6.7
Systolic blood pressure (SBP, mmHg) 126.1 (17.8) 11.2 77.4 (11.2) 8.1
Diastolic blood pressure (DBP, mmHg) 77.1 (10.8) 11.2 114.3 (37.5) 8.1
Current smoking n (%) 184 (25.4) 7.7 1802 (22.5) 5.4
CECS n = 565 n = 3548
Demographics
Age, mean (std) year 50 (7) 50 (8)
White race, n (%) 258 (45.6) 1550 (43.7)
Non-White race, n (%) 144 (25.4) 813 (22.9)
Unknown race, n (%) 163 (28.9) 1185 (33.4)
CVH factors mean (std), Avg # measures Avg # Avg #
A1C 7.2 (1.9) 3.6 7.1 (1.9) 2.9
LDL (mg/dL) 116.6 (36.0) 3.1 115.3(36.6) 2.2
BMI (kg/m2) 30.6 (7.7) 13.8 32.4 (8.6) 6.3
Systolic blood pressure (SBP, mmHg) 124.3 (17.7) 14.7 123.2 (18.6) 7.3
Diastolic blood pressure (DBP, mmHg) 77.5 (10.6) 14.7 76.6 (11.4) 7.3
Current smoking n (%) 206 (36.5) 10.1 838 (23.6) 5.0
COCS n = 240 n = 3000
Demographics
Age, mean (std) year 60 (7) 61 (8)
White race, n (%) 116 (48.4) 1698 (56.6)
Non-White race, n (%) 45 (18.9) 456 (15.2)
Unknown race, n (%) 79 (32.8) 846 (28.2)
CVH factors mean (std), Avg # measures Avg # Avg #
A1C 7.0 (1.4) 4.8 7.0 (1.7) 3.5
LDL (mg/dL) 105.4 (32.5) 3.6 106.1 (38.1) 2.9
BMI (kg/m2) 31.6 (7.3) 9.8 31.7 (7.7) 6.4
Systolic blood pressure (SBP, mmHg) 129.8 (18.5) 12.6 129.4 (19.4) 8.0
Diastolic blood pressure (DBP, mmHg) 76.8 (11.3) 12.6 76.9 (11.4) 8.0
Current smoking n (%) 71 (29.6) 8.4 713 (23.8) 5.4

* The percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

Fig 1 displays the performance of LSTM cancer screening predictions in terms of 10 repeated AUROCs for each type of screening. The average AUROC of 10 curves was 0.63 for BCS, 0.70 for CECS, and 0.61 for COCS.

Fig 1.

Fig 1

The area under the curve (AUC) are shown for LSTM cancer screening predictions from time-series CVH factors which were repeated 10 times with different comparison patients for BCS (A), CECS (B) and COCS (C).

Table 3 lists the numbers and proportions of patients in ideal, intermediate and poor categories for each submetric for the comparison between patients who received cancer screening and those who did not. We applied a Chi-squared test [29] to check if the frequencies (here percentages) between screening groups were significantly different from one other within each CVH submetric. As shown in Table 3, patients who received cancer screening had a higher prevalence of poor A1C (62% for BCS, 58% for CECS and 72% for COCS) compared to patients who did not receive screening (53% for BCS, 53% for CECS and 51% for COCS).

Table 3. Comparison CVH factors between patients with cancer screening or without [n (%)].

Patients with BCS (n = 725) BMI BP A1C LDL Smoking
Chi-squared p-value 0.70 0.87 0.20 0.56 0.89
Ideal 185 (13.8) 797 (28.5) 55 (11.9) 505 (68.2) 1747 (72.8)
Intermediate 315 (23.5) 1350 (48.2) 120 (25.9) 130 (17.6) 3 (0.1)
Poor 838 (62.6) 653 (23.3) 288 (62.2) 105 (14.2) 650 (27.1)
Patients without BCS (n = 8000)
Ideal 5308 (16.8) 17104 (28.8) 1168 (14.4) 8963 (69.4) 29449 (74.5)
Intermediate 7517 (23.8) 27254 (45.9) 2632 (32.4) 2527 (19.6) 96 (0.2)
Poor 18761(59.4) 15050 (25.3) 4324 (53.2) 1426 (11.0) 9968 (25.2)
Patients with CECS (n = 565) BMI BP A1C LDL Smoking
Chi-squared p-value 0.60 0.65 0.14 0.72 0.97
Ideal 325 (21.6) 1117 (36.3) 49 (15.5) 458 (68.8) 1532 (66.4)
Intermediate 481 (32.0) 1323 (43.0) 83 (26.2) 126 (18.9) 0 (0.0)
Poor 699 (46.4) 639 (20.8) 185 (58.4) 82 (12.3) 775 (33.6)
Patients without CECS (n = 3548)
Ideal 2009 (17.4) 8269 (32.6) 512 (18.1) 3224 (67.0) 11984 (72.9)
Intermediate 2773 (24.0) 11243 (44.3) 807 (28.6) 994 (20.6) 40 (0.2)
Poor 6789 (58.7) 5884 (23.2) 1502 (53.2) 596 (12.6) 4422 (26.9)
Patients with COCS (n = 240) BMI BP A1C LDL Smoking
Chi-squared p-value 0.99 0.54 0.00 0.37 0.09
Ideal 102 (18.2) 252 (23.2) 22 (9.6) 254 (81.4) 744 (82.9)
Intermediate 153 (27.3) 478 (44.1) 43 (18.7) 42 (13.5) 2 (0.2)
Poor 306 (54.5) 354 (32.7) 165 (71.7) 16 (5.1) 152 (16.9)
Patients without COCS (n = 3000)
Ideal 2098 (17.7) 5553 (25.3) 538 (15.1) 4533 (76.5) 10948 (73.2)
Intermediate 3235 (27.3) 10328 (47.0) 1198 (33.6) 869 (14.7) 34 (0.2)
Poor 6516 (55.0) 6101 (27.8) 1828 (51.3) 522 (8.8) 3972 (26.6)

Fig 2 shows changes in CVH submetrics within the same patient screening groups. Fig 2(A)–2(C) show the changes in CVH submetrics for the patients who were screened, while Fig 2(E) and 2(F) show the changes in CVH for patients who were not screened.

Fig 2.

Fig 2

The plots of percentages for poor CVH factors for the same patients before and after time points of cancer screening for patients with screenings (A)–(C) and before and after middle time points for patients without cancer screenings (D)–(F). The first row is for BCS, second row is for CECS and the third is for COCS.

From the first column of Fig 2, we can see that the prevalence of “poor” submetrics decreased after cancer screenings. For example, all five submetrics improved after BCS (Fig 2(A)), while BP and A1C improved after CECS (Fig 2(B)), and BP, A1C, and smoking improved after COCS (Fig 2(C)). Notably, for the prevalence of poor A1C decreased for all patients who received cancer screenings: 7% in BCS, 14% in CECS, and 17% in COCS. On the other hand, from the second column of Fig 2, we can see that the prevalence of “poor” A1C increased for all comparison patients.

Discussion

In this study, we demonstrated associations between time-series CVH risk factor measures and receipt of three types of cancer screenings, i.e., breast, cervical, and colon cancer screenings, by using a nationally representative dataset–TGA data. The TGA data enabled us to examine multiple sites, CVH submetrics, and types of cancer screenings using advanced deep learning models. An advantage of our study was that all 5 CVH submetrics were investigated simultaneously for an association with 3 different cancer screenings on a unique nationally representative dataset of patients, i.e., the large TGA data set, which contains longitudinal CVH measurements and cancer screening patterns from more than 70 different clinics in the US.

The comparison of different CVH measure distributions between patients who received cancer screenings and those who did not showed that patients with poorer CVH (especially poor A1C) were more likely to receive cancer screenings. Specifically, patients with poorer A1C were more likely to receive cancer screenings. Some recent studies have showed that individuals with diabetes had 30% higher incidence of certain cancers and also were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced-stage tumors [30–33]. Thus, providers might be more likely to recommend patients with diabetes to uptake cancer screenings for early prevention of developing cancers, which may lead to more individuals with diabetes to participate in cancer screenings.

Moreover, we investigated the effects of cancer screenings on the changes of CVH measures of the patients to better understand if the screenings had potential associations with the improvement of CVH measures. Our results indicated that patients who received cancer screenings appeared to have better control of CVH factors, especially A1C, than patients who did not receive cancer screenings. Specifically, A1C levels were improved after patients received any type of screening, while A1C levels worsened among patients who did not receive cancer screening. A similar trend could be observed for BMI: it became better after patients received any type of screening, while BMI became worse among patients without BCS or COCS. Levels of BP were improved after patients received BCS or COCS screenings and worsened among patients without BCS or COCS. Poor levels of LDL decreased among patients after receipt of BCS and among those without BCS. However, LDL improvements were much greater among patients after receipt of BCS (34% decrease in LDL) than those without BCS (10% decrease in LDL). After receipt of BCS and COCS, current smoking declined compared to the increase observed among those without the screenings.

In summary, our analyses showed that patients with poor CVH measures were more likely to receive cancer screenings. Patients with receipt of cancer screenings appeared to have improved CVH measures after the screening as compared to before. One possible reason for this was that patients might receive more attention and through care from providers to detect and manage CVH by virtue of reviewing cancer screening and other risk factor data. At the population level, better CVH is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancers [34,35]. Thus, cancer screenings may indirectly decrease burden and cost on the health system (e.g., CVD and cancers) by improving patient CVH health.

Limitations

There were some limitations in our analyses. We used values of AUROC to evaluate associations between time-series CVH measurements and receipt of cancer screenings. Higher AUROC values indicated stronger associations between predictors and the binary outcomes [36]. However, our observed AUROC values were relatively low and thus have limited clinical utility at this time. Cancer screenings are potentially affected by CVH and other factors. We acknowledge that we had relatively few patients with receipt of cancer screening. Specifically, there were relatively few patients who received cancer screenings compared to patients who did not within the same age and gender groups. This limitation likely affected the accuracy of our prediction models. The prediction accuracy of our models could be improved if more patients in our data set had received cancer screening.

Conclusions

We demonstrated that deep learning LSTM models can effectively predict the associations between time-series CVH measures and receipt of cancer screening. Poor CVH, especially poor A1C, may prompt providers to recommend cancer screening for their patients. And patients who received cancer screening may also receive better care for and/or have improved self-management of CVH, especially A1C. Overall, these findings suggest that unhealthier patients are screened for cancers, and that cancer screening may also prompt favorable changes in CVH.

Data Availability

The data are owned by a third party and the authors do not have permission to share the data. Requesting access to The Guideline Advantage (TGA) data must be done by contacting the American Heart Association via email: qualityresearch@heart.org. The Python code related to the analyses can be found in Github repository: https://github.com/aixiaguo/Python-Code.

Funding Statement

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

References

  • 1.https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php.
  • 2.Humphrey LL, Helfand M, Chan BKS, Woolf SH. Breast cancer screening: A summary of the evidence for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Annals of Internal Medicine. 2002. 10.7326/0003-4819-137-5_Part_1-200209030-00012 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 3.American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures 2017. Am Cancer Soc. 2017. 10.1177/0300985809357753 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 4.https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/cervical/statistics/index.htm.
  • 5.https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/prevention/screening.htm.
  • 6.https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/cervical/statistics/index.htm#1.
  • 7.Edwards QT, Li AX, Pike MC, Kolonel LN, Ursin G, Henderson BE, et al. Ethnic differences in the use of regular mammography: The multiethnic cohort. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2009. 10.1007/s10549-008-0049-7 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 8.Bynum JPW, Braunstein JB, Sharkey P, Haddad K, Wu AW. The influence of health status, age, and race on screening mammography in elderly women. Arch Intern Med. 2005. 10.1001/archinte.165.18.2083 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 9.Lipscombe LL, Hux JE, Booth GL. Reduced screening mammography among women with diabetes. Arch Intern Med. 2005. 10.1001/archinte.165.18.2090 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 10.Berz D, Sikov W, Colvin G, Weitzen S. “Weighing in” on screening mammography. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2009. 10.1007/s10549-008-0037-y [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 11.Cook NR, Rosner BA, Hankinson SE, Colditz GA. Mammographic screening and risk factors for breast cancer. Am J Epidemiol. 2009. 10.1093/aje/kwp304 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 12.Fontaine KR, Heo M, Allison DB. Body Weight and Cancer Screening among Women. J Womens Health Gend Based Med. 2001. 10.1089/152460901300233939 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 13.Hsia J, Kemper E, Kiefe C, Zapka J, Sofaer S, Pettinger M, et al. The importance of health insurance as a determinant of cancer screening: Evidence from the women’s health initiative. Prev Med (Baltim). 2000. 10.1006/pmed.2000.0697 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 14.Hueston W, Stiles M. The Papanicolaou smear as a sentinel screening test for health screening in women. Arch Intern Med. 154: 1473–1477. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 15.Robb KA, Miles A, Wardle J. Demographic and psychosocial factors associated with perceived risk for colorectal cancer. Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. 2004. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 16.Robb KA, Miles A, Wardle J. Perceived risk of colorectal cancer: Sources of risk judgments. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2007. 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-06-0151 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 17.Gimeno Garca AZ. Factors influencing colorectal cancer screening participation. Gastroenterology Research and Practice. 2012. 10.1155/2012/483417 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 18.Jensen PB, Jensen LJ, Brunak S. Mining electronic health records: Towards better research applications and clinical care. Nature Reviews Genetics. 2012. 10.1038/nrg3208 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 19.Goodfellow I, Bengio Y, Courville A. Deep Learning. MIT Press; 2016. 10.1533/9780857099440.59 [DOI] [Google Scholar]
  • 20.Rajkomar A, Oren E, Chen K, Dai AM, Hajaj N, Hardt M, et al. Scalable and accurate deep learning with electronic health records. npj Digit Med. 2018;1: 18 10.1038/s41746-018-0029-1 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 21.Hochreiter S& S. Long short-term memory. Neural Comput. 1997;9: 1735–1780. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 22.Bufalino V, Bauman MA, Shubrook JH, et al. Evolution of “The Guideline Advantage”: Lessons learned from the front lines of outpatient performance measurement. CA Cancer J Clin. 2014;64: 157–163. 10.3322/caac.21233 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 23.https://www.scripps.org/sparkle-assets/documents/heart_rhythm_facts.pdf.
  • 24.Shickel B, Tighe PJ, Bihorac A, Rashidi P. Deep EHR: A Survey of Recent Advances in Deep Learning Techniques for Electronic Health Record (EHR) Analysis. IEEE J Biomed Heal Informatics. 2018. 10.1109/JBHI.2017.2767063 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 25.Levenshtein VI. Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Sov Phys Dokl. 1966. citeulike-article-id:311174 [Google Scholar]
  • 26.Lloyd-Jones DM, Hong Y, Labarthe D, Mozaffarian D, Appel LJ, Van Horn L, et al. Defining and Setting National Goals for Cardiovascular Health Promotion and Disease Reduction. Circulation. 2010;121: 586–613. 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.192703 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 27.Mikolov T, Corrado G, Chen K, Dean J. word2vec. Proc Int Conf Learn Represent (ICLR 2013). 2013. [Google Scholar]
  • 28.Kingma DP, Ba J. ADAM: A METHOD FOR STOCHASTIC OPTIMIZATION. CoRR. 2015;abs/1412.6. [Google Scholar]
  • 29.Pearson K. On the criterion that a given system of deviations from the probable in the case of a correlated system of variables is such that it can be reasonably supposed to have arisen from random sampling. Philos Mag. 1900;5: 157–175. [Google Scholar]
  • 30.Tsilidis KK, Kasimis JC, Lopez DS, Ntzani EE, Ioannidis JPA. Type 2 diabetes and cancer: Umbrella review of meta-analyses of observationlal studies. BMJ (Online). 2015. 10.1136/bmj.g7607 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 31.Lipscombe LL, Fischer HD, Austin PC, Fu L, Jaakkimainen RL, Ginsburg O, et al. The association between diabetes and breast cancer stage at diagnosis: a population-based study. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2015. 10.1007/s10549-015-3323-5 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 32.Bhatia D, Lega IC, Wu W, Lipscombe LL. Breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening in adults with diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Diabetologia. 2020. 10.1007/s00125-019-04995-7 [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 33.Wilkinson JE, Culpepper L. Associations between colorectal cancer screening and glycemic control in people with diabetes, Boston, Massachusetts, 2005–2010. Prev Chronic Dis. 2011. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 34.Wang YQ, Wang CF, Zhu L, Yuan H, Wu LX, Chen ZH. Ideal cardiovascular health and the subclinical impairments of cardiovascular diseases: A cross-sectional study in central south China. BMC Cardiovasc Disord. 2017. 10.1186/s12872-017-0697-9 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 35.Foraker RE, Abdel-Rasoul M, Kuller LH, Jackson RD, Van Horn L, Seguin RA, et al. Cardiovascular health and incident cardiovascular disease and cancer: The Women’s Health Initiative. Am J Prev Med. 2016;50: 236–240. 10.1016/j.amepre.2015.07.039 [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  • 36.Yin J. Using the ROC Curve to Measure Association and Evaluate Prediction Accuracy for a Binary Outcome. Biometrics Biostat Int J. 2017. 10.15406/bbij.2017.05.00134 [DOI] [Google Scholar]

Decision Letter 0

Antonio Palazón-Bru

5 Jun 2020

PONE-D-20-10777

Time-series cardiovascular risk factors and receipt of screening for breast, cervical, and colon cancer: The Guideline Advantage

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Foraker,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 20 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

  • A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.

  • A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.

  • An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Antonio Palazón-Bru, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. In ethics statement in the manuscript and in the online submission form, please provide additional information about the patient records used in your retrospective study. Specifically, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.

3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide.

4. Your ethics statement must appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please also ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics section of your online submission will not be published alongside your manuscript.

5. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Table 2 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table.

6. Please include a caption for figure 3.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors investigate time-series cardiovascular risk factors and the association with cancer screening.

Major

- Average AUC values are not listed in the result section. Please do so.

- Discussion, please do not repeat your introduction in the first paragraph but list your main findings instead.

- The discussion is short and interpretation of results is limited. Please expand.

- AUC of models is quite limited, the authors should address this.

- It should be recommended to post the deep learning protocol at repositories like github, for other users to test.

Minor

- Introduction is on the long side please reduce to a single page.

- Avoid speaking language like “Fortunately”

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PLoS One. 2020 Aug 13;15(8):e0236836. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236836.r002

Author response to Decision Letter 0


6 Jul 2020

Response to reviewer comments

We would like to thank reviewers for the helpful comments. Please find our responses to the reviews below in bold. We hope you find the revised manuscript suitable for publication.

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

Thank you for the instructions, we have modified the manuscript according to the instructions.

2. In ethics statement in the manuscript and in the online submission form, please provide additional information about the patient records used in your retrospective study. Specifically, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.

Thank you. We have added the details “All the data were fully anonymized before we accessed them.”

3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide.

Thank you. In our Data Availability statement, we stated that we will be able to share the Python code related to the analyses at the time of acceptance of the manuscript. As the data owned by a third party, we do not have permission to share the data. Requesting access to The Guideline Advantage (TGA) data must be requested from the American Heart Association.

4. Your ethics statement must appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please also ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics section of your online submission will not be published alongside your manuscript.

Thank you. We have moved the ethics statement to the beginning of the Methods section.

5. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Table 2 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table.

Thank you for the great comment. We have included the Table 2 in the text.

6. Please include a caption for figure 3.

Thank you. We have corrected figure 3 to figure 2 which included a caption.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Thank you for the point. Please find the data availability statement in our manuscript as follows.

“Data availability statement

The data are owned by a third party and the authors do not have permission to share the data. Requesting access to The Guideline Advantage (TGA) data must be requested from the American Heart Association. The study team will be able to share the code related to the analyses at the time of acceptance of the manuscript.”

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors investigate time-series cardiovascular risk factors and the association with cancer screening.

Major

- Average AUC values are not listed in the result section. Please do so.

Thank you for the great point. We have added the average AUC values in the result section.

- Discussion, please do not repeat your introduction in the first paragraph but list your main findings instead.

Thank you for the great point. We have modified the first paragraph by listing our main findings in discussion section.

- The discussion is short and interpretation of results is limited. Please expand.

Thank you for the great point. We have expanded the discussion section and interpreted more of the results.

- AUC of models is quite limited, the authors should address this.

Thank you, this is a great point. We have addressed this limit in the limitation section.

- It should be recommended to post the deep learning protocol at repositories like github, for other users to test.

Thank you for the great suggestion. We have created a github repository and have posted the related Python code here: https://github.com/aixiaguo/Python-Code

Minor

- Introduction is on the long side please reduce to a single page.

Thank you, we reduced the introduction to one page.

- Avoid speaking language like “Fortunately”

Thank you, we have deleted the speaking language similar to “Fortunately”.

Attachment

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers PONE-D-20-10777R1.docx

Decision Letter 1

Antonio Palazón-Bru

10 Jul 2020

PONE-D-20-10777R1

Time-series cardiovascular risk factors and receipt of screening for breast, cervical, and colon cancer: The Guideline Advantage

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Foraker,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 24 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

  • A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.

  • A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.

  • An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Antonio Palazón-Bru, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors addressed most comments to satisfaction. One minor comment:

Please start discussion listing the most important finding: “In this

study, we demonstrated associations between time-series” , “Regular cancer … after cancer screenings” can be deleted.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PLoS One. 2020 Aug 13;15(8):e0236836. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236836.r004

Author response to Decision Letter 1


10 Jul 2020

Please start discussion listing the most important finding: “In this study, we demonstrated associations between time-series”, “Regular cancer … after cancer screenings” can be deleted.

Thank you. We really appreciate your great comments.

We have deleted “Regular cancer … after cancer screenings”.

Attachment

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Decision Letter 2

Antonio Palazón-Bru

15 Jul 2020

Time-series cardiovascular risk factors and receipt of screening for breast, cervical, and colon cancer: The Guideline Advantage

PONE-D-20-10777R2

Dear Dr. Foraker,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Antonio Palazón-Bru, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Th authors greatly improved the manuscript. AL comments have been addressed to satisfaction. No further remakes,

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Acceptance letter

Antonio Palazón-Bru

3 Aug 2020

PONE-D-20-10777R2

Time-series cardiovascular risk factors and receipt of screening for breast, cervical, and colon cancer: The Guideline Advantage

Dear Dr. Foraker:

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Antonio Palazón-Bru

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Associated Data

    This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

    Supplementary Materials

    Attachment

    Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers PONE-D-20-10777R1.docx

    Attachment

    Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

    Data Availability Statement

    The data are owned by a third party and the authors do not have permission to share the data. Requesting access to The Guideline Advantage (TGA) data must be done by contacting the American Heart Association via email: qualityresearch@heart.org. The Python code related to the analyses can be found in Github repository: https://github.com/aixiaguo/Python-Code.


    Articles from PLoS ONE are provided here courtesy of PLOS

    RESOURCES