Caring for a Loved One with Advanced Cancer: Determinants of Psychological Distress in Family Caregivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Family caregivers caring for a patient with terminal cancer may experience significant psychological distress. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the family caregivers' psychological distress is influenced by the patients' performance status while taking into account individual characteristics of caregivers and their unmet needs. METHODS: Two hundred twelve family caregivers were assigned to three cohorts according to the patient's performance status, as measured by the Eastern Collaborative Oncology Group Functional Scale (ECOGS). Interview information was collected on the services and care provided, as well as on the caregivers' characteristics and level of psychological distress. RESULTS: Family caregivers' psychosocial distress is strongly associated with the patients' terminal disease progress and declined functioning. The level of psychological distress varies from 25.2 to 33.5 (p = 0.0008) between the groups. Moreover, the percentage of caregivers with a high level of psychological distress varies from 41% to 62%, while this percentage is estimated at 19.2% in general population. A high distress index was significantly associated with the caregiver's burden, the patient's young age, the patient's symptoms, the caregiver's young age and gender, a poor perception of his/her health and dissatisfaction with emotional and tangible support. CONCLUSIONS: Family caregivers of patients in the advanced stages of cancer experience a high level of psychological distress, which increases significantly as the patient loses autonomy. Health care policies and programs need to be revisited in order to take the reality of these patients and their families into account.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".