A Systematic Review of Barriers to Breast Cancer Care in Developing Countries Resulting in Delayed Patient Presentation

Table 2

PICOTTS eligibility criteria for studies included in review.

	Inclusion	Exclusion
Population	Female patients with breast cancer living within developing countries.	Males, benign breast disease, living in the developed world.
Intervention	A questionnaire inquiring about personal, sociocultural, and economic variables that may have contributed to delayed patient presentation.	Any study that did not explicitly define potential variables contributing to patient delay, or did not apply questionnaire consistently to every patient.
Control	Patients who presented without delay, but not required.	None.
Outcome	A definition of patient delayed presentation or an interval >12 weeks between discovery of first symptom to presentation to a provider.	Any study that did not include its own definition of patient delay, did not report a symptom-presentation interval, or examined provider delay only.
Time (intervention)	Any study conducted after 1990.	Any study conducted before 1990.
Time (follow-up)	No follow-up period required	None.
Study design	Case series, cross-sectional, or case-control, with a sample size of at least 𝑛=10.	Single case report, cohort study, randomized-controlled trial, expert consensus and/or other review, any sample size of 𝑛<10.