Alexithymia May Be Associated With Depression in Early-Stage Breast Cancer Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Depression, anxiety, or both are common in women with early-stage breast cancer (BC). A relationship is known between low perceived social support (PSS) and depression. We aimed to investigate the relationships between alexithymia, PSS, and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) score in patients diagnosed with early-stage BC. Materials and methods A demographic and medical information form, BDI, the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Multidimensional Scale of PSS (MSPSS) were given to 200 early-stage BC patients to respond. Two subgroups were created as group A (BDI score < 17) and group B (BDI score ≥ 17) and compared in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, TAS-20, and MSPSS scores. Results Twenty-six (18.1%), 48 (33.3%), and 26 (18.1%) patients were with high BDI scores, in low PSS status, and alexithymic, respectively. The median ages of the participants in group A and group B were 53.4 (interquartile range (IQR): 46-60.7) and 46 (IQR: 41.5-59) years, respectively (p = 0.083). The rates of single participants (26.9% versus 11%, p = 0.055), alexithymic participants (42.3% versus 12.7%, p = 0.001), low PSS levels (57.7% versus 28%, p = 0.018), psychiatric treatment history (46.2% versus 22%, p = 0.025), and patients with low income (57.7% versus 22.9%, p = 0.001) were higher in group B than in group A. In the multivariate regression model that contains the parameters mentioned above, psychiatric treatment history (odds ratio (OR): 2.758, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.034-7.356, p = 0.043), low-income status (OR: 3.503, 95% CI: 1.336-9.182, p = 0.011), and alexithymia (OR: 3.482, 95% CI: 1.229-9.867, p = 0.019) were independent predictive factors for a high BDI. Conclusion Alexithymia and low PSS are significantly common in patients with prominent depressive symptoms in early-stage BC patients. Alexithymia may be associated with depression and may also have a role in depression pathogenesis in early-stage BC patients. New studies are needed to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between alexithymia and depression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
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) | 0.001 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".