Age-Related Patterns in Adaptation to Cancer Pain: A Mixed-Method Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Although older people make up the majority of cancer patients, little is known about aging and cancer pain. The objective of this study was to explore age-related patterns in adaptation to chronic cancer-related pain in younger and older patients. DESIGN: A mixed-method study combining quantitative measures with individual semi-structured interviews. Quantitative measures included the Brief Pain Inventory, Pain Management Index, Charlson Comorbidity Index, and Karnofsky Performance Status. SETTING: Two outpatient clinics (Palliative Care and Cancer Pain service) in an academic cancer hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Fifteen younger (average age: 48.9 +/- 4.9 years old) and 17 older (average age: 72.4 +/- 9.2 years old) people with cancer-related pain. RESULTS: Two age-related adaptation outcomes emerged from the interviews: "Waiting to live" and "Living despite pain." Younger patients were more likely than older patients to be "Waiting to live." They felt that complete pain relief was necessary before their lives could move forward and reported feeling out of control, angry, and unable to accept their pain. Marital strain was common. "Living despite pain" was more frequent among older than younger patients. These patients accepted pain as an inevitable part of cancer, pursued life goals, and modified activities to maximize engagement. Marital growth was common. CONCLUSION: Older and younger cancer patients described different adaptations to cancer pain despite reporting comparable pain intensity and interference. Older patients adapted by employing accommodative strategies. Younger patients were less likely to use these strategies and struggled with accepting the losses associated with cancer pain. These findings may guide future research into age-related patterns in cancer pain and the development of psychosocial interventions tailored to patients' life stage challenges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".