Psychological distress in patients with a left ventricular assist device and their partners: An exploratory study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Left ventricular assist device (LVAD) therapy is increasingly used in patients with advanced heart failure, and may have a significant psychological impact on both patients and their partners. Hence, we examined the distress levels of LVAD patients and their partners. METHODS: Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were assessed at 3-4 weeks after implantation, and at 3 and 6 months follow-up in 33 LVAD patients (73% men; mean age=54±10 years) and 33 partners (27% men; mean age=54±11 years). RESULTS: The prevalence of anxiety in LVAD partners was significantly higher compared to LVAD patients at baseline (48% vs. 23%, p=0.03) and 3 months follow-up (44% vs. 15%, p=0.02), but not at 6 months follow-up (p=0.43). No differences were found for depression and PTSD (ps>0.05). Scores between the LVAD patients and partners showed only a significant correlation at baseline between the anxiety, depression and PTSD score of the patient and the depression score of the partner (r anx=0.40, p=0.04; rdep=.40, p=0.04; r PSTD=0.46, p=0.05). Multivariable analyses showed no significant association between the role (patient vs. partner) and anxiety, depression and PTSD over time after correction for age, gender and clinical covariates. However, after correction for Type D personality and the use of psychotropic medication the LVAD partners showed significantly higher anxiety (F=6.95, p=0.01) and depression (F=3.94, p=0.04) scores over time compared to LVAD patients. CONCLUSION: LVAD partners had significantly higher levels of anxiety than LVAD patients. Emotional distress of LVAD partners should gain more attention, as partners are an essential source of support for LVAD patients.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".