{"doi":"10.1002/cncr.35549","title":"Reply to “Critical analysis of the study from Reiner et al. on agreement of medical record abstraction and self‐report of breast cancer treatment”","abstract":"We thank Wang and colleagues for their interest in our article1 and their sentiment that our research provides valuable insights into the agreement between medical record abstraction (MRA) and self-reported breast cancer treatment data. We would like to respond to their points. We are surprised at their criticism of our decision to use MRA as the gold standard in our study. Wang et al. acknowledged that medical records are often considered accurate but suggested that incorporating multiple data sources might be considered, including direct verification with health care providers. Epidemiologic studies have historically relied upon MRA with trained medical record abstractors as the gold standard in obtaining information pertaining to cancer treatment.2, 3 We are following suit. Notably, in our study, the MRA was conducted through multiple health care providers across different specialties, including information obtained directly from physician's offices and oncology clinics based on treatment locations provided by study participants through direct interviews as well as from radiation oncology clinic notes, an approach that exceeded typical MRA. Furthermore, no cancer registry data were used to ascertain treatment information in our study. Although in a few cases some treatment information was missing (e.g., lost or destroyed), no additional complete source of data was potentially available. Another suggestion was to consider a wider range of age at breast cancer diagnosis. The Women’s Environmental Cancer and Radiation Epidemiology (WECARE) Study is a multicenter, population-based, case–control study in which all participants were diagnosed with first primary invasive breast cancer from 1985 to 2008 before age 55 years.4, 5 By design, we are unable to broaden the age range of WECARE Study participants in this study. In a prior study of 350 patients who had breast cancer with no restriction on age at breast cancer diagnosis, agreement between self-report and MRA on surgery, chemotherapy, endocrine therapy, and radiation therapy was also high and, importantly, was not modified by age.6 Thus it does not appear that, for women with breast cancer who are recalling treatment modality, recall ability would be affected by age. Wang and colleagues suggest that our investigation of recall bias was not thoroughly analyzed, citing that recall accuracy can diminish over time and that cancer's psychological impact can influence recall. Our primary analysis of interest was to estimate the accuracy of self-report of breast cancer treatment modality and analyze whether accuracy was heterogeneous across recall windows over more than 2 decades. We found excellent agreement between self-report and MRA and no modification by recall window. In fact, we reported that agreement for all three breast cancer treatment modalities was highest for the longest recall window. Finally, Wang et al. criticized our methodology, suggesting that a more nuanced approach would include Bland–Altman plots, sensitivity, and specificity. Bland–Altman plots are appropriate in a statistical setting with continuous measures.7 Our measures were binary for each breast cancer treatment modality, so we disagree with the statistical appropriateness of this suggestion. In response to Wang and colleagues, we have now assessed sensitivity and specificity for each breast cancer treatment modality; all were 90% or higher for each modality and for each recall window. Estimation of sensitivity and specificity complemented our original concordance and kappa results. We remain confident in our conclusion that self-reported treatment modality information in younger women with breast cancer can be reliably ascertained even 2 decades post diagnosis. The authors thank the WECARE Study data collection site Principal Investigators and their research staff who worked to obtain these data. The authors also thank the WECARE Study participants. This work was funded by the US National Institutes of","journal":"Cancer","year":2024,"id":502912,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9576,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":339844,"name":"Julia A. Knight","orcid":"0000-0002-7610-7635","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":6558,"name":"Esther M. John","orcid":"0000-0003-3259-8003","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":353157,"name":"Charles F. Lynch","orcid":"0000-0002-9542-6439","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":473275,"name":"Kathleen E. Malone","orcid":"0000-0002-5643-6714","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1310373,"name":"Xiaolin Liang","orcid":"0000-0003-4997-6728","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":473274,"name":"Meghan Woods","orcid":"0000-0002-0514-3938","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":402364,"name":"James C. Root","orcid":"0000-0001-7332-6165","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":42579,"name":"Jonine L. Bernstein","orcid":"0000-0001-8634-3837","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":288021,"name":"Anne S. Reiner","orcid":"0000-0002-1258-6112","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":6,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:10:27.781502Z","pmid":"39233462","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}