Beyond the bucket list: Unfinished and business among advanced cancer patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective The study aims to examine the prevalence and common themes of unfinished business (UB) and its associations with distress among advanced cancer patients. Methods A total of 223 patients from a larger randomized controlled trial of Individual Meaning‐Centered Psychotherapy (IMCP) completed self‐report questionnaires that assessed UB and UB‐related distress, hopelessness, desire for hastened death, anxiety and depression, quality of life, spiritual well‐being, and purpose/meaning. Unfinished business themes were identified by qualitative analysis of open‐ended data. Results A total of 161 (72%) patients reported the presence of UB. The mean UB‐related distress score was 7.01 (SD = 2.1) out of 10. Results of independent t tests showed that patients with UB reported significantly higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of existential transcendence than patients without UB. Linear regression equations indicated that UB‐related distress significantly predicted hopelessness ( F 1,154 = 9.54, P < 0.05, R 2 = 0.058), anxiety ( F 1,154 = 4.31, P < 0.05, R 2 = 0.027), personal meaning ( F 1,136 = 6.18, P < 0.05, R 2 = 0.043), and existential transcendence ( F 1,119 = 6.7, P < 0.05, R 2 = 0.053). Ten UB themes emerged from open‐ended responses; UB themes were not associated with UB‐related distress or psychological adjustment. Conclusions Unfinished business was both prevalent and distressing in our sample. Findings underscore the need to develop and implement interventions designed to help patients resolve or find solace with UB.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".