Age and depression in patients with metastatic cancer: the protective effects of attachment security and spiritual wellbeing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Psychological distress in cancer patients is inversely related to age, although the reasons are unclear. The adult development literature suggests that ageing may be associated with the development of adaptive capacities, specifically greater attachment security (the sense that others will be available and supportive when needed) and spirituality (the capacity to view one's life as having meaning, purpose and value), that enable older people to cope better with disease. We examined whether age-related patterns in attachment security and spiritual wellbeing account for the protective effect of age against distress. Measures of depression, attachment security, spiritual wellbeing and disease burden were collected from 342 patients aged from 21 to 88 years with advanced, metastatic cancer. Attachment security and spiritual wellbeing were tested as mediators of the effect of age on depression, controlling for disease burden. It was found that age was associated inversely with depression and positively with spiritual wellbeing and attachment security. Depression was inversely related to attachment security and spiritual wellbeing, and the effect of age on depression was fully mediated by attachment security and spiritual wellbeing. The relative protection from psychological distress among older cancer patients may be the result of age-related developmental accomplishments and/or differences in the response to adverse life-events.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".