The impact of psychosocial intervention on survival in cancer: a meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The impact of psychosocial interventions on survival remains controversial in patients with cancer. A meta-analysis of the recent literature was conducted to evaluate the potential survival benefit associated with psychosocial interventions for cancer patients. METHODS: MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Central were searched from January 2004 to May 2015 for all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared survival outcomes between cancer patients receiving a psychosocial intervention and those receiving other, or no interventions. Endpoints included one-, two-, and four-year overall survival. Subgroup analyses were performed to compare group-versus individually-delivered interventions, and to assess breast cancer-only trials. RESULTS: Of 5,080 identified articles, thirteen trials were included for analysis. There was a significant survival benefit for the intervention group at one year [risk ratio (RR) =0.82; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.67-1.00; P=0.04] and two years (RR =0.86; 95% CI, 0.78-0.95; P=0.003). However, no significant difference was detected at four years (RR =0.94; 95% CI, 0.85-1.04; P=0.24). Among patients with breast cancer, there was a significant survival benefit of psychosocial interventions at one year (RR =0.59; 95% CI, 0.42-0.82; P=0.002), but no difference at two years (RR =0.82; 95% CI, 0.67-1.02; P=0.07) or four years (RR =0.95; 95% CI, 0.73-1.23; P=0.68). Group-delivered interventions had a significant survival benefit favouring the intervention group at one year (RR =0.57; 95% CI, 0.41-0.79; P=0.0008), but no difference at two years (RR =0.84; 95% CI, 0.68-1.02; P=0.08) or four years (RR =0.94; 95% CI, 0.75-1.20; P=0.64). Individually-delivered interventions had no significant survival benefit at one year (RR =0.92; 95% CI, 0.79-1.08; P=0.32), two years (RR =0.87; 95% CI, 0.75-1.00; P=0.05), or four years (RR =0.93; 95% CI, 0.84-1.04; P=0.21). CONCLUSIONS: For the main analysis and group-delivered treatments, psychosocial interventions demonstrated only short-term improvements in survival. Individually-delivered interventions failed to show any survival benefit. Future studies with longer follow-up are warranted to investigate long-term survival outcomes.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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, 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".