Young adults' experiences with cancer: comments from patients and survivors.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine the experiences with cancer of adults diagnosed when between 20 and 35 years old. DESIGN: Qualitative study using semistructured interviews. SETTING: Largest health care region in the province of New Brunswick. PARTICIPANTS: Six men and 9 women cancer patients and survivors. METHOD: Fifteen adults interviewed when between the ages of 20 and 43 representing a variety of cancers and stages of disease were recruited for this study. Interviews were guided by a set of open-ended questions and explored participants' experiences with cancer from initial presentation of symptoms through to survivorship issues. MAIN FINDINGS: The most important clinical issue that emerged from the analysis was that participants' youth appeared to contribute to delays in diagnosis of cancer. These delays were attributed to either patients' or physicians' inaction. Some patients attributed their initial cancer symptoms to the adverse effects of alcohol or excessive partying; others feared a bad diagnosis and delayed seeking help. Family physicians frequently interpreted nonspecific symptoms as resulting from patients' lifestyle choices and were reluctant to consider a diagnosis of cancer. Several family physicians reportedly believed that persistent symptoms could not be the result of cancer because patients were too young. CONCLUSION: Although cancer is relatively rare in young adults, family physicians need to include it in differential diagnoses. Both patients and physicians tend to minimize cancer symptoms in young adults. Delays in diagnosis might not affect health outcomes, but can cause distress to young adults with cancer.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".