Patient-reported disease-specific concerns relating to sexuality in multiple myeloma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background: Cancer has been increasingly recognized as having lasting effects on sexuality. Sexual function in breast and reproductive cancer survivors is better characterized, but the experiences of hematological cancer survivors remain understudied. Only one previous study acknowledges the existence of sexuality concerns among multiple myeloma (MM) survivors. This study explored MM patients' experiences of sexual expression and examined patient-provider communication about sexuality. Methods: Participants with MM ( N = 65) were recruited internationally for an online survey about sexual experiences. Open-ended questions queried MM disease–specific experiences that may affect engagement in sexual activity, methods used to adapt to sexual changes, and communication with health care providers. Responses were analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results: Participants identified several barriers to sexual activity associated with MM, including concerns about bone health, infections, and vaginal bleeding and bruising. They also described adapting to sexual challenges by trying sexual medicines/aids, changing their mode of sexual expression, and managing treatment risks related to sexuality. Half of the participants reported sexuality discussions with providers, with a minority receiving sexual health-related recommendations. Conclusions: To date, the results of sexuality studies focus largely on hematological cancers as a group, without exploring specific disease experiences. Participants reported sexual difficulties common to other cancers but also some which may be unique to MM. Sexuality concerns were underaddressed by health care providers. Given that some sexuality concerns are related specifically to disease risk, discussions with oncology providers are of particular importance; therefore, specific suggestions for improving patient-provider communication and care are offered.
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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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".