Screening for depression in palliative cancer patients attending a pain and symptom control clinic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Depression in palliative care patients is often underrecognized. Screening can increase case recognition. The aims of this study were to assess the prevalence of depression in palliative cancer patients attending a pain and symptom control clinic and to investigate the validity and utility of a depression visual analogue scale in detecting depression in the advanced cancer outpatient population. METHOD: One hundred and thirty-two oncology outpatients who came for consultation at a multidisciplinary pain and symptom control clinic were asked and agreed to complete the Brief Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (BZSDS; Dugan et al., 1998) and depression visual analogue scale (DVAS). RESULTS: The majority of participants (72%) indicated clinically significant depressive symptoms according to the BZSDS (21% in the "mild" depressive symptoms range, 32% in the "moderate" range, and 19% in the "severe" range). Participants indicated low endorsement rates of items related to overt manifestation of depression (e.g., sadness, tearfulness, irritability, and suicide ideation). The DVAS showed high correlation with the BZSDS (r = .82) and is a potentially useful screening instrument for detecting depressive disorder in palliative care cancer patients. SIGNIFICANCE OF RESULTS: The results of the study underline the importance of routine screening to detect depressive disorder in palliative care patients to improve their quality of care. The depression visual analogue scale was found to be an effective simple screening tool, easy to administer and use.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".