Mechanisms of change of a cognitive-existential group intervention for fear of cancer recurrence: mediation analyses of the FORT trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: Meta-analyses have demonstrated that brief interventions can address fear of cancer recurrence (FCR), but their mechanisms of action are largely unknown. Our goal was to identify the mediators of treatment efficacy of the Fear Of Recurrence Therapy (FORT) intervention using data from a multisite randomized controlled trial targeting FCR. That randomized controlled trial compared a 6-week cognitive-existential group intervention with an active control group. Methods: Participants (n = 135) were women diagnosed with stage I-III breast or gynecological cancer who were assessed at 4 time points (pretherapy, post-therapy, 3-month, and 6-month follow-up). The primary outcome, changes in FCR at 6 months, was measured with the Fear of Cancer Recurrence Inventory. We examined 6 mediators based on our theoretical model of FCR: perceived risk of recurrence, uncertainty in illness, intolerance of uncertainty, positive beliefs about worrying, reassurance-seeking, and cognitive avoidance. Changes in the possible mediator variables were simultaneously investigated to predict changes in FCR using Generalized Structural Equation Models with robust variance estimation. Results: FORT predicted FCR at 6 months in univariate analyses (β = −8.93, P = .0001). In the model including the 6 possible mediators, changes in uncertainty in illness (β = −8.72, P < .0001) and cognitive avoidance (β = −8.36, P < .0001) mediated the relationship between treatment and changes in FCR. However, FORT still predicted changes in FCR at 6 months (β = −6.35, P = .02), suggesting partial mediation. Conclusions: We identified 2 mechanisms of action that can be incorporated in future interventions. However, other processes that underlie the efficacy of these interventions need to be uncovered.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| 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".