Psilocybin-assisted Existential, Attachment and RelationaL (PEARL) therapy for patients with advanced cancer: protocol for a multi-method feasibility trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Individuals with advanced cancer often experience high levels of distress for which there are few standardized treatment approaches. Our multidisciplinary team has combined existing evidence-based approaches into Psilocybin-assisted Existential, Attachment, and RelationaL (PEARL) therapy. PEARL therapy combines elements from psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, including preparatory therapy sessions, a high-dose psilocybin session, and integration sessions, with important elements from evidence-based psychotherapies designed for patients with advanced cancer. METHOD: This open-label, single-arm clinical trial will assess the acceptability, feasibility, and safety of PEARL therapy among 15 patients with advanced cancer, using qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Participants will complete self-report questionnaires at four time points pre- and post-intervention, as well as a qualitative interview one month after PEARL completion. Feasibility will be evaluated in terms of recruitment, retention, and adherence rates, while safety will be assessed based on the number of participants experiencing no serious adverse events. DISCUSSION: This study will yield important information about the acceptability and feasibility of PEARL therapy and contribute to growing research around the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapies. PEARL therapy has the potential to improve quality of life among those with advanced disease, and careful research is needed to guide public policy, legislation, therapist training, and clinical guidelines. TRIAL REGISTRATION: NCT06416085; 2024-07-16.
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 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 | 0.036 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.065 | 0.012 |
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".