The Edmonton Symptom Assessment System: Poor performance as screener for major depression in patients with incurable cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Depressive symptoms are prevalent in patients with advanced cancer, sometimes of a severity that fulfil the criteria for a major depressive episode. AIM: The aim of this study was to investigate how the item on depression in the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System with a 0-10 Numerical Rating Scale performed as a screener for major depressive episode. A possible improved performance by adding the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Anxiety item was also examined. DESIGN: An international cross-sectional study including patients with incurable cancer was conducted. The Edmonton Symptom Assessment System score was compared against major depressive episode as assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. Screening performance was examined by sensitivity, specificity and the kappa coefficient. SETTING: Patients with incurable cancer (n = 969), median age 63 years and from eight nationalities provided report. Median Karnofsky Performance Status was 70. Median survival was 229 days (205-255 days). RESULTS: Patient Health Questionnaire-9 major depressive episode was present in 133 of 969 patients (13.7%). Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Depression screening ability for Patient Health Questionnaire-9 major depressive episode was limited. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.71 (0.66-0.76). Valid detection or exclusion of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 major depressive episode could not be concluded at any Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Depression cut-off; by the cut-off Numerical Rating Scale ⩾ 2, sensitivity was 0.69 and specificity was 0.60. By the cut-off Numerical Rating Scale ⩾ 4, sensitivity was 0.51 and specificity was 0.82. Combined mean ratings by Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Depression and Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Anxiety revealed similar limited screening ability. CONCLUSION: The depression and anxiety items of the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System, a frequently used assessment tool in palliative care settings, seem to measure a construct other than major depressive episode as assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 instrument.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".