High Symptom Burden and Low Functional Status in the Setting of Multimorbidity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To enhance understanding of the relationship between multimorbidity, symptom burden, and functional status in individuals with life-limiting illness. DESIGN: Secondary analysis of baseline data from a randomized clinical trial conducted in the Palliative Care Research Cooperative Group. Group differences were tested using a t-test; multivariate regression analysis was used to determine the effect of multiple variables on functional status and symptom burden. SETTING: Fifteen Palliative Care Research Cooperation sites. PARTICIPANTS: Adults who participated in a parent statin-discontinuation clinical trial were included in the analysis (N = 381). Inclusion criteria were diagnosis of a life-limiting illness, statin use for 3 months or longer, life expectancy longer than 1 month, and declining functional status. MEASUREMENTS: Cancer diagnosis (solid organ and hematologic malignancies), multimorbidity (Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) score), symptom burden (Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) score, number of symptoms with ESAS severity score >4), functional status (Australia-modified Karnofsky Performance Scale (AKPS)). RESULTS: Fifty-one percent had a primary diagnosis of cancer; mean age 74.1 ± 11.6. Participants had multiple comorbid illnesses (CCI score 4.9 ± 2.8), multiple symptoms (ESAS score 27.2 ± 15.9), and poor functional status (AKPS = 53 ± 13). In univariate and multivariate analyses, multimorbidity was associated with greater symptom burden (4.2 vs 3.1 moderate or severe symptoms (t = -3.2, P = .002), 12% vs 6% with severe symptoms (t = -3.7, P < .001)), but cancer diagnosis was not. In univariate and multivariate analyses, higher symptom burden was associated with poorer functional status (F = 11.6, P < .001), but multimorbidity was not. CONCLUSION: Symptoms cannot be attributed solely to a diagnosis of cancer. The association between symptom burden and functional status underscores the importance of clinical attention to symptoms in individuals with multimorbidity.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".