The stress effect and the role of psychosocial factors in multiple sclerosis: a prospective study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: studies assessing the stress effect on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) progression yielded disparate results. Under a transactional approach this study aims to investigate: a) how stress and MS progression may be related over time; and b) the moderator effect of coping, social support, anxiety, alexithymia and early-life stress. Methods: twenty-six MS patients participated in this one year follow-up longitudinal observational study. The following data was collected. Stress: weekly, a self-reported diary; monthly, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Psychosocial factors: at baseline, the Strategic Approach to Coping Scale (SACS), the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Disease progression: trimonthly, the self-reported Functionality Assessment of MS (FAMS) questionnaire, at baseline and at the end, impairment (EDSS), and at any moment the relapse rate. Multiple hierarchical regression models were conducted to test the stress-MS relationship and the moderator effect of psychosocial factors. Findings: perceived stress and functionality were negatively related in both directions in the trimonthly assessments [PSS-FAMS: β=-1.38, CI(-2.21 to 0.56); p=.002; FAMS-PSS: β=-0.18, CI(-0.22 to -0.13); p<.001]. Impairment and relapses did not show any relationship with stress. Active coping and low anxiety showed a moderator effect between perceived stress and functionality [PSSxCoping: β=0.96, CI(0.19 to 1.72); p=.01; PSSxSTAI: β=-1.60, CI(-2.90 to -0.29); p=.01]. Discussion: the bidirectional hypothesis was confirmed only with self-reported measures. Psychotherapeutic interventions should be implemented at early stages of MS focusing on coping and anxiety as they are potentially modifiable factors.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".