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Late adjuvant chemotherapy (aCT) administration after colectomy (56 d) is known to be associated with impaired prognosis. We aim to identify risk factors associated with late aCT, especially the travel time between patients' home and hospital.We performed a retrospective monocentre cohort study. Patients included had a colectomy for a stage III or high risk stage II colon cancer between 2009 and 2015 performed at a French university hospital. Risk factors for late aCT were identified using a fractional polynomial logistic regression.Ninety-four patients were included. The risk of late aCT was associated with travel time length, emergent colectomy, the need for scheduled care before aCT, and length of time between colectomy and postoperative multidisciplinary meeting advising aCT.Our study suggests that, in patients with colon cancer, factors unrelated to disease severity and complexity could be associated with a higher risk of late aCT.

Longitudinal binary data are often used in panel studies where short-term associations between air pollutants and respiratory health outcomes are investigated. A Markov regression model in which the transition probabilities depend on the covariates, as well as the past responses, was used to study the short-term association between daily ozone (O3) concentrations and respiratory health outcomes in a panel of schoolchildren in Armentieres, Northern France. The results suggest that there was a small but statistically significant association between O3 and children's cough episodes. A 10 μg/m3 increase in O3 concentrations was associated with a 13.9 % increase in cough symptoms (CI 95% = 1.2–28.1%). The use of a Markov regression model can be useful as it permits one to address easily both the regression objective and the stochastic dependence between successive observations. However, it is important to verify the sensitivity of the Markov regression parameters to the time-dependence structure. In this study, it was found that, although what happened on the previous day was a strong predictor of what happened on the current day, this did not contradict the O3-respiratory symptom associations. Compared to the Markov regression model, the signs of the parameter estimates of marginal and random-intercept models remain the same. The magnitudes of the O3 effects were also essentially the same in the three models, whose confidence intervals overlapped. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.