Identifying radiation-induced survivorship syndromes affecting bowel health in a cohort of gynecological cancer survivors

Figures

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  Fig 1. The estimated factor loadings onto the six factors after the Varimax rotation was performed. Factor loadings are colored according to factor affiliation and are connected by solid lines of the corresponding color. Dashed horizontal lines correspond to the factor specific cutoffs suggested by the Variable Cutoff Method. Crosses of a specific color correspond to factor loadings strictly greater in magnitude than the cutoff of the same color whereas solid dots of a specific color correspond to factor loadings smaller in magnitude than the cutoff of the corresponding color. Using the Variable Cutoff Method 10000 parametric bootstrap estimates of the factor loadings were calculated and 0,0.01,…,0.99,1 were used as candidate cutoffs.

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  Fig 2. The result of applying the cutoffs suggested by the Variable Cutoff Method to the estimated factor loadings onto the six factors. Dots correspond to factor loadings that are strictly greater in magnitude than the factor specific cutoff. Lines through the dots correspond to the magnitude of the specific factor loadings and are presented for comparison purposes only with the aim of identifying the variables that most heavily load onto a specific factor and thus to aid interpretation. The plot illustrates how cutoffs on factor loadings ease the interpretation of the factor loading structure produced by EFA. Several factor loadings are discarded by the Variable cutoff method. Based on this reduced factor loading structures the six factors were interpreted as: Urgency syndrome (red), Leakage syndrome (green), Constipation (dark blue), Excessive gas discharge (light blue), Excessive mucus discharge (magenta), Blood discharge (black).

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  Fig 3. Comparisons between estimated factor score quantile positions of survivors and controls for the six factors. The 0.25, 0.5 (median), 0.75, 0.9 and 0.95 sample quantiles are presented. Scores were calculated based on the reduced factor loading structure. Prior to calculating scores a simple mode imputation was performed. Further Mann-Whitney p-values were calculated and are presented to the left in the figure. Except in the case of the constipation factor, the factor scores of the treated population were found to be distributed significantly differently from the scores of the non-treated population. Clearly, in all cases where these distributions differ, the scores of the survivors tend to be larger than the scores of the controls.