Perceived barriers to cervical cancer screening and motivators for at-home human papillomavirus self-sampling during the COVID-19 pandemic: Results from a telephone survey

  1. Susan L Parker  Is a corresponding author
  2. Ashish A Deshmukh
  3. Baojiang Chen
  4. David R Lairson
  5. Maria Daheri
  6. Sally W Vernon
  7. Jane R Montealegre
  1. Baylor College of Medicine, United States
  2. Medical University of South Carolina, United States
  3. UTHealth School of Public Health, United States
  4. Harris Health System, United States

Abstract

Background: Home-based self-sampling for human papillomavirus (HPV) testing may be an alternative for women not attending clinic-based cervical cancer screening.

Methods: We assessed barriers to care and motivators to use at-home HPV self-sampling kits during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of a randomized controlled trial evaluating kit effectiveness. Participants were women aged 30-65 and under-screened for cervical cancer in a safety-net healthcare system. We conducted telephone surveys in English/Spanish among a subgroup of trial participants, assessed differences between groups, and determined statistical significance at p<0.05.

Results: Over half of 233 survey participants reported that clinic-based screening (Pap) is uncomfortable (67.8%), embarrassing (52.4%), and discomfort seeing male providers (63.1%). The last two factors were significantly more prevalent among Spanish versus English speakers (66.4% vs. 30% (p=0.000) and 69.9 vs. 52.2% (p=0.006), respectively). Most women who completed the kit found Pap more embarrassing (69.3%), stressful (55.6%), and less convenient (55.6%) than the kit. The first factor was more prevalent among Spanish versus English speakers (79.6% vs. 53.38%, p=0.001) and among patients with elementary education or below.

Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic influenced most (59.5%) to participate in the trial due to fear of COVID, difficulty making appointments, and ease of using kits. HPV self-sampling kits may reduce barriers among under-screened women in a safety-net system.

Funding: This study is supported by a grant from the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD, R01MD013715, PI: JR Montealegre).

Clinical trial number: NCT03898167.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file; Source Data files have been provided for Tables 1-4.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Susan L Parker

    Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States
    For correspondence
    susan.parker2@bcm.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6722-4717
  2. Ashish A Deshmukh

    Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Baojiang Chen

    Michael and Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living, UTHealth School of Public Health, Austin, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. David R Lairson

    Michael and Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living, UTHealth School of Public Health, Houston, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Maria Daheri

    Harris Health System, Houston, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Sally W Vernon

    Michael and Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living, UTHealth School of Public Health, Houston, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  7. Jane R Montealegre

    Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities (R01MD013715)

  • Jane R Montealegre

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The survey was administered by trained, bilingual researcher coordinators in the patient's preferred language (English or Spanish). Participants were asked to provide verbal consent before commencing the survey and were sent a $20 gift card upon completion. This research was reviewed and approved by Baylor College of Medicine and Harris Health System's Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) (protocol ID H-44944). A waiver of written documentation of informed consent was granted by the IRBs for participants in the parent study given the minimal risks involved and to minimize participation bias. An IRB-approved verbal consent script was read to participants randomized to participate in the telephone survey. After being read the script, patients were given the opportunity to ask questions, and verbally indicated whether they consented to participate in the telephone survey. A consent to publish was not obtained as only aggregate data will be reported.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Johannes Berkhof, Amsterdam UMC Location VUmc, Netherlands

Publication history

  1. Received: November 3, 2022
  2. Accepted: May 25, 2023
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: May 26, 2023 (version 1)

Copyright

© 2023, Parker et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Susan L Parker
  2. Ashish A Deshmukh
  3. Baojiang Chen
  4. David R Lairson
  5. Maria Daheri
  6. Sally W Vernon
  7. Jane R Montealegre
(2023)
Perceived barriers to cervical cancer screening and motivators for at-home human papillomavirus self-sampling during the COVID-19 pandemic: Results from a telephone survey
eLife 12:e84664.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84664

Further reading

    1. Epidemiology and Global Health
    Katharine Sherratt, Hugo Gruson ... Sebastian Funk
    Research Article Updated

    Background:

    Short-term forecasts of infectious disease burden can contribute to situational awareness and aid capacity planning. Based on best practice in other fields and recent insights in infectious disease epidemiology, one can maximise the predictive performance of such forecasts if multiple models are combined into an ensemble. Here, we report on the performance of ensembles in predicting COVID-19 cases and deaths across Europe between 08 March 2021 and 07 March 2022.

    Methods:

    We used open-source tools to develop a public European COVID-19 Forecast Hub. We invited groups globally to contribute weekly forecasts for COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by a standardised source for 32 countries over the next 1–4 weeks. Teams submitted forecasts from March 2021 using standardised quantiles of the predictive distribution. Each week we created an ensemble forecast, where each predictive quantile was calculated as the equally-weighted average (initially the mean and then from 26th July the median) of all individual models’ predictive quantiles. We measured the performance of each model using the relative Weighted Interval Score (WIS), comparing models’ forecast accuracy relative to all other models. We retrospectively explored alternative methods for ensemble forecasts, including weighted averages based on models’ past predictive performance.

    Results:

    Over 52 weeks, we collected forecasts from 48 unique models. We evaluated 29 models’ forecast scores in comparison to the ensemble model. We found a weekly ensemble had a consistently strong performance across countries over time. Across all horizons and locations, the ensemble performed better on relative WIS than 83% of participating models’ forecasts of incident cases (with a total N=886 predictions from 23 unique models), and 91% of participating models’ forecasts of deaths (N=763 predictions from 20 models). Across a 1–4 week time horizon, ensemble performance declined with longer forecast periods when forecasting cases, but remained stable over 4 weeks for incident death forecasts. In every forecast across 32 countries, the ensemble outperformed most contributing models when forecasting either cases or deaths, frequently outperforming all of its individual component models. Among several choices of ensemble methods we found that the most influential and best choice was to use a median average of models instead of using the mean, regardless of methods of weighting component forecast models.

    Conclusions:

    Our results support the use of combining forecasts from individual models into an ensemble in order to improve predictive performance across epidemiological targets and populations during infectious disease epidemics. Our findings further suggest that median ensemble methods yield better predictive performance more than ones based on means. Our findings also highlight that forecast consumers should place more weight on incident death forecasts than incident case forecasts at forecast horizons greater than 2 weeks.

    Funding:

    AA, BH, BL, LWa, MMa, PP, SV funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant 1R01GM109718, NSF BIG DATA Grant IIS-1633028, NSF Grant No.: OAC-1916805, NSF Expeditions in Computing Grant CCF-1918656, CCF-1917819, NSF RAPID CNS-2028004, NSF RAPID OAC-2027541, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 75D30119C05935, a grant from Google, University of Virginia Strategic Investment Fund award number SIF160, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under Contract No. HDTRA1-19-D-0007, and respectively Virginia Dept of Health Grant VDH-21-501-0141, VDH-21-501-0143, VDH-21-501-0147, VDH-21-501-0145, VDH-21-501-0146, VDH-21-501-0142, VDH-21-501-0148. AF, AMa, GL funded by SMIGE - Modelli statistici inferenziali per governare l'epidemia, FISR 2020-Covid-19 I Fase, FISR2020IP-00156, Codice Progetto: PRJ-0695. AM, BK, FD, FR, JK, JN, JZ, KN, MG, MR, MS, RB funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland with grant 28/WFSN/2021 to the University of Warsaw. BRe, CPe, JLAz funded by Ministerio de Sanidad/ISCIII. BT, PG funded by PERISCOPE European H2020 project, contract number 101016233. CP, DL, EA, MC, SA funded by European Commission - Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology through the contract LC-01485746, and Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and FEDER, with the project PGC2018-095456-B-I00. DE., MGu funded by Spanish Ministry of Health / REACT-UE (FEDER). DO, GF, IMi, LC funded by Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under project number 20200700ER. DS, ELR, GG, NGR, NW, YW funded by National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (R35GM119582; the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NIGMS or the National Institutes of Health). FB, FP funded by InPresa, Lombardy Region, Italy. HG, KS funded by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. IV funded by Agencia de Qualitat i Avaluacio Sanitaries de Catalunya (AQuAS) through contract 2021-021OE. JDe, SMo, VP funded by Netzwerk Universitatsmedizin (NUM) project egePan (01KX2021). JPB, SH, TH funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; grant 05M18SIA). KH, MSc, YKh funded by Project SaxoCOV, funded by the German Free State of Saxony. Presentation of data, model results and simulations also funded by the NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 (https://www.nfdi4health.de/task-force-covid-19-2) within the framework of a DFG-project (LO-342/17-1). LP, VE funded by Mathematical and Statistical modelling project (MUNI/A/1615/2020), Online platform for real-time monitoring, analysis and management of epidemic situations (MUNI/11/02202001/2020); VE also supported by RECETOX research infrastructure (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic: LM2018121), the CETOCOEN EXCELLENCE (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/17-043/0009632), RECETOX RI project (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16-013/0001761). NIB funded by Health Protection Research Unit (grant code NIHR200908). SAb, SF funded by Wellcome Trust (210758/Z/18/Z).

    1. Epidemiology and Global Health
    Ekaterina Schneider, Dora Hopf ... Beate Ditzen
    Research Article

    Background:

    Affectionate touch, which is vital for mental and physical health, was restricted during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study investigated the association between momentary affectionate touch and subjective well-being, as well as salivary oxytocin and cortisol in everyday life during the pandemic.

    Methods:

    In the first step, we measured anxiety and depression symptoms, loneliness and attitudes toward social touch in a large cross-sectional online survey (N = 1050). From this sample, N = 247 participants completed ecological momentary assessments over 2 days with six daily assessments by answering smartphone-based questions on affectionate touch and momentary mental state, and providing concomitant saliva samples for cortisol and oxytocin assessment.

    Results:

    Multilevel models showed that on a within-person level, affectionate touch was associated with decreased self-reported anxiety, general burden, stress, and increased oxytocin levels. On a between-person level, affectionate touch was associated with decreased cortisol levels and higher happiness. Moreover, individuals with a positive attitude toward social touch experiencing loneliness reported more mental health problems.

    Conclusions:

    Our results suggest that affectionate touch is linked to higher endogenous oxytocin in times of pandemic and lockdown and might buffer stress on a subjective and hormonal level. These findings might have implications for preventing mental burden during social contact restrictions.

    Funding:

    The study was funded by the German Research Foundation, the German Psychological Society, and German Academic Exchange Service.