How do women with a family history of breast cancer act on genetic advice in general practice?

Report from the BMJ's full editoral committee meeting

Members of the committee were:
Nicola Britten, Trish Groves, Kevin Jones, Azeem Majeed, Julie Morris
 

Thank you for sending us this paper. We are pleased to say that we would like to publish it in the BMJ if you are willing to revise it into the form of a short report:

  1. Your paper was seen by an independent clinical reviewer (please see enclosed report) who made many comments that we would like you to respond to in revising your paper. We appreciate that you may not be able to answer all of these points in a short report, but we would like you to do as much as you can. Short reports are up to 600 words, with up five references and one table or figure. This probably means that you will not be able to provide the extra figure that the reviewer requests.
  2. The committee made the following additional comments:

    3.  

     

    a Please state how many women could have included in the study ie please provide the denominator for the sample of 81 women seen between April 1994 and July 1995. Did this number include all women consulting their family physicians consecutively during that period in the health care centre, or were any women missed?

    b Do you have any idea how reliable your case finding system was? Has anyone ever checked the computerised medical records using some other kind of data source eg hand written records, to see if the recording of risk factors and diseases is always accurate and complete?

    c We agreed with the reviewer's comments about compliance. you seem to make a value judgement that non-compliance by patients was in some way a bad thing, but do not make the same assumptions about the doctors' failure to follow recommended advice. We know that you will not have much room to discuss this in a short report, but we would like you to acknowledge that women may sometimes have good reasons for not following advice eg they may lack good information on the risks and benefits, or may have problems of access to specialist services.
     
     
     
     

  3. The last points relate to our processes:
a The BMJ aims to include the design of each study in the title; please amend your title accordingly.   b Short reports have a brief introduction, then a section entitled Subject, Methods and Results, and finally a Comment section. Please ensure that the main message of the paper is given in the first sentence of the Comment section.

c Please provide a word count.

d Please reassure us that your study obtained ethical approval and please mention this in your paper.

e We are now processing all manuscripts electronically, so please could you provide us with a copy of your article on disk as well as in hard copy. Please see the enclosed guidance about our preferred formats. If you cannot provide one of these please send a disk anyway with a note of the software used.

f It would help us greatly if you would send with your revised paper a covering letter explaining how you have responded to all the points raised in this report.