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Record W4412156597 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0327383

Patient education for older adults with cancer and their caregivers: Protocol for a scoping review

2025· article· en· W4412156597 on OpenAlexaff
Lin Lü, Janet Papadakos, Rouhi Fazelzad, Kristen R. Haase, Shabbir M.H. Alibhai, Fay Bennie, Martine Puts

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS ONE · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicPalliative Care and End-of-Life Issues
Canadian institutionsOlds CollegeUniversity of British ColumbiaUniversity Health NetworkPrincess Margaret Cancer CentreUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsProtocol (science)GerontologyMedicineMEDLINECancerBioinformaticsBiologyAlternative medicineInternal medicinePathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Treatment decision-making for older adults is complex due to multimorbidity, polypharmacy, and age-related changes such as sensory impairment and cognitive decline. In addition, many older adults have lower health literacy, which impacts their ability to access, understand, and apply health information. Patient education plays a critical role to comprehend a new cancer diagnosis, explore treatment options, and manage care effectively. To be effective, education materials must be specifically tailored to the needs of this population. Despite growing recognition of the importance of geriatric-specific cancer education, no recent review has synthesized the literature on educational interventions or materials developed for this population. This review aims to answer the question: What is known about patient education interventions and materials developed for older adults with cancer and their caregivers and their effectiveness to improve outcomes?. We will follow the Arksey and O'Malley framework, refined by Levac et al., and report according to the PRISMA-ScR checklist. We will search Medline ALL, Embase, Emcare, Cochrane Central, PsycInfo (all via OvidSP), and Scopus (via Elsevier) for studies published from 2000 onward and complete a manual search of the references of included studies. A health sciences librarian conducted the searches. We will include peer-reviewed and relevant grey literature. Stakeholder consultation will be conducted to inform interpretation of findings and identify gaps. Eligible studies will use qualitative or quantitative designs focused on geriatric oncology patient education. Two reviewers will independently screen studies and extract data using Covidence and Excel. Data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and narrative synthesis. The quality of peer-reviewed studies will be appraised with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (2018) for descriptive purposes only. This scoping review will map existing educational interventions and materials for older adults with cancer, support clinicians in practice, and highlight gaps to inform future research and development.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.069
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.057
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Protocol · Consensus signal: Protocol
Teacher disagreement score0.106
Threshold uncertainty score0.364

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0690.057
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0060.006
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0150.017
Bibliometrics0.0160.015
Science and technology studies0.0050.004
Scholarly communication0.0080.009
Open science0.0060.007
Research integrity0.0080.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.1060.017

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.

Opus teacher head0.124
GPT teacher head0.426
Teacher spread0.301 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreProtocol

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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