Trial reportBMC research notes2025
The participation in cervical cancer screening is not altered by the Hawthorne effect among patients of doctors participating in the randomized clinical trial PaCUDAHL.
Trial report in BMC research notes, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveThe PaCUDAHL randomized clinical trial evaluated an HPV self-sampling device provided by the family doctor to female patients not participating in the usual opportunistic cervical screening program from 2016 to 2019. Reliable data on the Hawthorne (observer) effect (HE) in clinical trials were lacking. This nested study aimed to verify whether there was a significant difference between participating and non-participating general practitioners (GPs) in the trial, and to measure whether there was an HE in the female patients of participating GPs.
resultsWe carried out an analytical retrospective cohort study involving 332 GPs and their 70,983 female patients, aged 25-65, registered with the Health Insurance Fund of Flanders, using claims database for the three-year periods 2012-2015 and 2016-2019. Statistical analyses were performed using a linear generalized hierarchical mixed model with geographic level as a random effect. The patients of the 24 participating GPs did not have a cervical cancer screening rate different from that of the non-participating GPs, either before recruitment (p = 0.24) or during the PaCUDAHL trial period (p = 0.15). There were significant increases in cervical cancer screening rates over four years regardless of the group considered (p < 0.0001). In conclusion there was no observer effect but a significant cohort effect.
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