PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine receipt of follow-up surveillance among sexual minority and heterosexual survivors and identify survivor-, physician-, and practice-level characteristics associated with follow-up surveillance. METHODS: An average of 3 years after their stage I-III colorectal cancer diagnosis, we recruited survivors from four cancer registries. A questionnaire, which queried about sexual orientation and other eligibility criteria, was mailed to all cancer survivors. Subsequently, 418 eligible survivors without recurrent disease participated in a telephone survey. Colorectal cancer-specific follow-up surveillance was defined as colonoscopy, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) test, or imaging test. We used logistic regression with forward selection to obtain models that best explained each follow-up test. RESULTS: About 10% of survivors received no follow-up surveillance, while 70% had colonoscopies. While survivors irrespective of sexual orientation received follow-up surveillance, sexual minority survivors had 3 times the odds of receiving imaging tests compared to heterosexual survivors. Having a designated provider of any specialty was most salient for the receipt of surveillance. CONCLUSIONS: Sexual minority survivors' greater receipt of imaging tests may indicate providers perceive them at greater risk for recurrence than heterosexual survivors. Future studies need to examine provider behaviors towards monitoring colorectal cancer survivors of diverse sexual orientations. IMPLICATIONS FOR CANCER SURVIVORS: Guidelines recommend surveillance of colorectal cancer survivors to improve survival. This study showed that having a designated provider for follow-up is most salient for the receipt of surveillance, most survivors receive surveillance, and sexual minority survivors had more imaging tests compared to heterosexual survivors.

OBJECTIVES: Mini-Sentinel is a pilot project sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to create an active surveillance system to monitor the safety of FDA-regulated medical products. We assessed the capability of the Mini-Sentinel pilot to provide prevalence rates of medication use among pregnant women delivering a liveborn infant. METHODS: An algorithm was developed to identify pregnancies for a reusable analytic tool to be executed against the Mini-Sentinel Distributed Database. Diagnosis and procedure codes were used to identify women ages 10-54 years delivering a liveborn infant between April 2001 and December 2012. A comparison group of age- and date-matched nonpregnant women was identified. The analytic code was distributed to all 18 Mini-Sentinel data partners. The use of specific medications, selected because of concerns about their safe use during pregnancy, was identified from outpatient dispensing data. We determined the frequency of pregnancy episodes and nonpregnant episodes exposed to medications of interest, any time during the pregnant/matched nonpregnant period, and during each trimester. RESULTS: The analytic tool successfully identified 1,678,410 live birth deliveries meeting the eligibility criteria. The prevalence of use at any time during pregnancy was 0.38 % for angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and 0.22 % for statins. For < /=0.05 % of pregnancy episodes, the woman was dispensed warfarin, methotrexate, ribavirin, or mycophenolate. CONCLUSIONS: The analytic tool developed for this study can be used to assess the use of medications during pregnancy as safety issues arise, and is adaptable to include different medications, observation periods, pre-existing conditions, and enrollment criteria.