Psychosocial Interventions to Relieve Traumatic Stress Symptoms in Family Caregivers of Children With Cancer: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Traumatic stress symptoms are common, severe, and persistent in family caregivers of children with cancer, but the benefits of therapeutic interventions to relieve them are not well established. AIM: To review, describe, and appraise the available research on psychosocial interventions aimed at alleviating traumatic stress symptoms in family caregivers of children with cancer. METHODS: Systematic searches of APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, MEDLINE, and Embase were conducted to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and nonrandomized studies of psychosocial interventions (NRSIs) for families affected by pediatric cancer in which traumatic stress symptoms were reported as a primary or secondary outcome. Results were screened by independent reviewers in duplicate. 18 articles were included. All were evaluated for risk of bias and data on study design, intervention format, delivery, and impact, and were abstracted for narrative synthesis. RESULTS: Study samples (8-430 participants) were primarily comprised of mothers of children with acute leukemia. Most interventions (1 day-15 weeks) involved an interventionist (n = 17; 94%) and used cognitive-behavioral techniques (n = 14; 78%). Eight RCTs (n = 10; 80%) and seven NRSIs (n = 8; 87.5%) found a significant reduction in traumatic stress symptoms following intervention delivery, with small to large effect sizes (Cohen's d = 0.28-1.30). However, only three RCTs confirmed having adequate power to comment on effectiveness. Risk of bias ranged from low to moderate. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence and problematic nature of traumatic stress symptoms in this population is well documented in the observational literature. However, the evidence remains unclear as to the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions to alleviate them due to methodological limitations in current interventional research. High quality RCTs that include a diverse group of family caregivers are needed to demonstrate their effectiveness and to inform clinical care practices aimed at improving family wellbeing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".