Care Trajectories Are Linked to Mental Health and Mortality in Cancer Patients
Simon D. Lindner, Elisabeth L. Zeilinger, Amelie Fuchs, Simone Lubowitzki, Alexander Gaiger + 1 more
TLDR
This study identifies distinct cancer care trajectories using temporal data, significantly improving mortality prediction and revealing unexpected links to baseline mental health.
Key contributions
- Developed a time-analysis framework using DTW and clustering to identify nine distinct cancer care trajectory phenotypes.
- Trajectory clusters significantly enhance mortality prediction, outperforming conventional clinical and demographic variables.
- Identified two high-risk patterns: long-term complex care and shorter, intense trajectories, both linked to higher mortality.
- High-utilization complexity trajectories were unexpectedly associated with significantly lower baseline anxiety scores.
Why it matters
This paper introduces a novel framework for analyzing complex cancer care pathways using temporal data. Its findings demonstrate that incorporating these care trajectories significantly improves mortality prediction and risk stratification in precision oncology. The unexpected link between high utilization and lower baseline anxiety also opens new avenues for research into patient psychology.
Original Abstract
Treatment of cancer involves heterogeneous, complex care pathways. The relationship between these longitudinal trajectories, baseline mental health, and prognostic outcomes remains poorly understood. We introduce an interpretable time-analysis framework leveraging these temporal dynamics, analyzing care patterns spanning up to 37 years for >8,000 patients. Using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Hierarchical Clustering on sequence data of healthcare encounters, we identified nine distinct, robust trajectory phenotypes. We evaluated their prognostic utility by incorporating them into generalized linear models alongside conventional clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic covariates. The trajectory clusters significantly enhanced mortality prediction and maintained independent predictive significance. Compared to a low-utilization reference group (mortality 31.5%), all eight remaining clusters exhibited substantially higher mortality odds. We uncovered two primary high-risk trajectory patterns: long-term, complex care pathways reflecting chronic disease courses (up to 196 events; mortality OR up to 3.38, 95% CI 2.13-5.37), and shorter but intense trajectories indicating rapid progression (median 78 events; OR 2.32, 95% CI 1.82-2.97). Unexpectedly, the high-utilization complexity clusters were associated with significantly lower baseline anxiety scores, highlighting a divergent relationship between trajectory intensity, mortality risk, and initial psychological burden. These results demonstrate that incorporating temporal healthcare utilization data uncovers robust trajectory phenotypes capturing multidimensional prognostic information. This offers significant explanatory power beyond established static variables for refining risk stratification in precision oncology.
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