How common is depression among ALS caregivers? A longitudinal study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our objective was to assess the impact of personal, situational and patient characteristics on mood, and changes over time, among ALS caregivers. Seventy-one patient-caregiver pairs were interviewed once and 51 (72%) monthly until endpoints of death or tracheostomy for long-term mechanical ventilation (LTMV). Depressive symptoms and DSM-IV disorders, coping strategies, caregiver burden, satisfaction with care-giving, and patient disease severity were assessed. At baseline, 13% of caregivers had major depression, and 10% had minor depression. Rates declined at last visit before death or LTMV (median interval three months), as did depressive symptoms. Correlates of caregiver depression included reliance on avoidance, perceived burden, fatigue, and feeling that the patient was critical and unappreciative. Half of the 14 caregivers of patients who planned LTMV were depressed at baseline, declining to 8% at endpoint, versus 16% (9/57) among caregivers of patients who died, declining non-significantly to 11%. While few personal or situational factors were correlated with caregiver distress, patients' plans and degree of supportiveness influenced caregiver mood. Verbal comments of caregivers clarified the distinction between sadness and psychiatric depression. The high baseline rate of depression among caregivers of patients who planned tracheostomy decreased as caregivers instituted major changes in patient care or personal counseling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".