Evaluation of support groups for women with breast cancer: importance of the navigator role.

Background: At least some forms of breast cancer are increasingly being viewed as a chronic illness, where an emphasis is placed on meeting the various ongoing needs of people living with cancer, their families and other members of their social support networks. This commentary outlines some approaches to the evaluation of cancer-related support groups, with a particular emphasis on those designed to provide long-distance support, via the internet, for women with breast cancer.

Discussion: The literature on evaluations of community-based cancer support groups indicates that they offer a number of benefits, and that it is more reasonable to expect an impact of such interventions on psychosocial functioning and/or health-related quality of life than on survival.

Success factors for open access.

Open access to the peer-reviewed primary research literature would greatly facilitate knowledge transfer between the creators and the users of the results of research and scholarship. Criteria are needed to assess the impact of recent initiatives, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative. For example, how many open-access research journals exist within a given field, and what is the reputation of each one? And, how many openly-accessible institutional e-print archives have been created and how many are actually are being used by researchers and scholars? A simple approach to an assessment of the open-access portion of the medical literature is described, and some preliminary results are summarized.

Finding Canadian cancer clinical trials on the Internet: an exploratory evaluation of online resources.

Background: Online information about the availability of clinical trials promises to enhance the accrual of patients into trials. The primary objective of our study was to assess the completeness of online databases of breast cancer clinical trials available in Canada.

Methods: Eligible online resources were identified through a search of MEDLINE (articles published from 1966 to January 2002), an Internet search with Google, examination of Web sites of cancer organizations and information from experts.

Principlism and the ethical appraisal of clinical trials.

For nearly two decades, the process of reviewing the ethical merit of research involving human subjects has been based on the application of principles initially described in the U.S. National Commission's Belmont Report, and later articulated more fully by Beauchamp and Childress in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics.