A couples intervention for patients facing advanced cancer and their spouse caregivers: outcomes of a pilot study
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a couples intervention in improving marital functioning in advanced cancer patients and their spouse caregivers. A secondary objective was to determine its impact on other symptoms of psychosocial distress and its feasibility and acceptability as a clinical intervention. METHODS: Using a one-arm pre- and post-intervention prospective design, 16 couples were provided 8 weekly sessions of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, modified and manualized for the cancer population. Subjects' marital functioning (Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale [RDAS]), symptoms of depression (Beck Depression Inventory-II [BDI-II]), and hopelessness (Beck Hopelessness Scale) were assessed through self-report at T0 (baseline), T1 (after four sessions), T2 (after eight sessions), and T3 (3 months post-intervention follow-up). RESULTS: RDAS scores improved from T0 to T2, with 87.5% of the couples showing some improvement (0.5-5 points) or significant improvement (>5 points) in marital functioning and 68.8% scoring in the non-distressed range (>or=48 RDAS). At T3, 60% of the couples (n=15) continued to score in the non-distressed range on the RDAS. BDI-II scores were significantly higher for patients than for caregivers. There was a significant reduction in the mean BDI-II score from T0 to T3 in all subjects (n=30). This reduction was more significant for the patients (n=15). CONCLUSIONS: Providing support to couples at this challenging time may result in improved marital functioning and an opportunity for relational growth during end-stage cancer. This study serves as the first step in the development of an empirically validated intervention for couples.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it