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Objective: The prognosis for ovarian cancer patients remains poor. A key to maximizing survival rates is early detection and treatment. This requires an accurate prediction of malignancy. Our study seeks to improve the accuracy of prediction by focusing on early subjective assessment of malignancy. We therefore investigated the assessment of patients themselves in comparison to the assessment of physicians.Methods: One thousand three hundred and thirty patients participated in a prospective and multicenter study in six hospitals in Berlin. Using univariate analysis and multivariate logistic regression models, we measured the accuracy of the early subjective assessment in comparison to the final histological outcome. Moreover, we investigated factors related to the assessment of patients and physicians.Results: The patients' assessment of malignancy is remarkably accurate. With a positive predictive value of 58%, the majority of patients correctly assessed a pelvic mass as malignant. With more information available, physicians achieved only a slightly more accurate prediction of 63%.Conclusions: For the first time, our study considered subjective factors in the diagnostic process of pelvic masses. This paper demonstrates that the patients' personal assessment should be taken seriously as it can provide a significant contribution to earlier diagnosis and thus improved therapy and overall prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The desire to have children has been declining globally, especially in industrialized nations. This study examines the physical health correlates, and positive and negative mental health correlates of the wish to have a child across time and in two countries.Method: Questionnaire data were obtained from large-scale university samples of 12,574 participants in Germany and China.Results: The wish to have a child (child wish) is related to positive and negative mental health in China and, to a lesser degree, in Germany. Child wish is positively related to some aspects of mental and somatic health for Chinese women and men, negatively to depression for Chinese and German men and Chinese women, and positively to stress for German men, with generally small effects. Effects hold when controlling for age, partnership status, and family affluence. Most relationships were almost equal between women and men (in both China and Germany), and between countries with the exception of two different paths in each gender group. That is, having a partner is associated with a higher child wish in both Chinese and German female students. In China, older female students are more likely to want to have a child, while older female students in Germany are less likely to want to have a child. Neither partnership nor age predict child wish for the next year.Conclusion: In sum, Chinese students reported feeling more positively about having children when they were happy and healthy, with the exception that highly satisfied Chinese males report lower child wish in the next year. More depressed Chinese and German men and Chinese women reported lowered child wish, and stressed German men reported more child wish. Older students reported more (Chinese) or less (German) child wish depending on country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]