22 July 2021
FAITH is a multi-centre project, including a specialist team from the Champalimaud Foundation, aiming to address an issue that has gone under the radar for too long: to monitor, aid and improve the mental health of cancer patients worldwide.
In recognition of their endeavour, the FAITH project has been nominated for an ‘.eu Web Award’ in the ‘Better World’ category, The .eu Web Awards are an online competition, launched in 2014 and designed to acknowledge the best websites using the .eu, .ею or .ευ extensions, in six dynamic categories. Finalists with the highest scores from the jury will be selected as winners, and will be announced during the Awards ceremony held on 16 October 2021.
To commemorate this achievement, and to give more information about this uplifting project, we brought together some of the FAITH team members to discuss their work, goals and the role that they play within the Champalimaud Foundation and the wider community.
Introducing some of the Champalimaud Foundation’s members of the FAITH team:
- Albino Oliveira-Maia - Coordinating Investigator / Local Principal Investigator.
- Pedro Ferreira - PhD student
- Raquel Lemos - Post-doctoral fellow.
- Sílvia Almeida - Psychologist
- Sofia Marques - Coordination
The FAITH project aims to improve knowledge in two strategic areas: cancer and mental health. Negative trends in mental health presentation of patients that have undergone cancer treatment are routinely integrated in our clinical decision-making to improve the patient’s quality of life and aftercare, based on psychological assessment and validated questionnaires. With FAITH, we will specifically monitor patients after the end of their oncological treatments regarding depression markers/risk of depression, and use these and other data, including an app, an easy-to-use smart wristband, and inflammation markers, to validate a predictive model for earlier effective detection, and thus earlier management, of depression in patients at risk.
This project will promote Champalimaud's societal impact by strengthening ties between clinical and research activities that will positively contribute to clinical care and bring new insights into both neuropsychiatry and cancer.
The Champalimaud team is involved in the FAITH project as a clinical and research partner with expertise both in mental health and in cancer. It will also contribute to the design and implementation of the study. It will additionally conduct research based on the analyses of the project’s patients' movement signatures as markers of depression.
In fact, our involvement in the project was initiated by a former patient, who was himself a renowned researcher and academic who, knowing the centre’s expertise, approached us to consider participation in the project proposal.
The CCC has a unique research experience, now bringing together both cancer and neuropsychiatry with increasingly robust involvement in many clinical studies.
The Centre also possesses the structure and facilities necessary to accomplish complex research projects with human participation, from their design and ethics evaluation to their operation, connecting patients, clinicians and researchers on a daily basis. It houses patient-focused multidisciplinary teams offering the highest level of care based on the most advanced technology, with particular attention to cancer-related clinical research and practice. We hope that this experience, from scientific, clinical and operational points of view, will prove to be an asset to the Consortium.
Our staff includes both mental health and other clinical specialty professionals, such as psychiatrists, psychologists, oncologists, radiologists, nutritionists, and nurses, as well as a wide range of research staff like neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, biomechanics experts, computer scientists and others. The CCU’s goal is to make pioneering scientific discoveries and translate them into solutions that improve the patients’ quality of life, providing the highest level of clinical care.
Depression is one of the most common mental health conditions, characterised by a wide range of cognitive, affective and/or somatic symptoms resulting in a significant impact on important areas of our daily life. Patients with depression often experience persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, decrease in the ability to think or concentrate, diminished interest or pleasure, and fatigue, most of the day, nearly every day. Depression can be more difficult to assess in an oncological setting, as some symptoms may actually represent a normal response when the patient receives bad news, is undergoing treatment, experiencing pain and repeatedly confronting a potentially life-threatening reality. It is possible to measure depression and other affective disorders when using validated instruments, namely structured interviews and questionnaires. That is, instruments that were previously scientifically studied, and evaluated, showing their ability to measure with accuracy, to help differentiate depression and its severity, with specific defined cut-off values.
The Champalimaud Clinical Centre is structured into Multidisciplinary Pathology Units, seven of them dedicated to treatment and research on the major types of Cancer: at the moment these units are the Breast Unit, the Lung Unit, the Urology Unit, the Digestive Unit, the Gynaecology Unit, the Haemato-Oncology Unit, and the Dermatology Unit. Our research focus is related to the understanding of the influence of psychological characteristics and affective disorders, such as depression, in oncological patients’ short- and long-term quality of life.
It has been demonstrated in the literature that the primary cancer site is one of the factors contributing to rates of depression, with depression being most common in patients with lung or pancreatic cancer. Although it is not yet explained, the involvement of inflammation in cancer known to differ depending on cancer subtype is believed to contribute to depression. In this project, we will also explore the biological mechanisms underlying the occurrence of depression in lung cancer survivors.
While we do not have strong scientific evidence that depression and other mental disorders can impact cancer progression, its influence in adherence to treatment and in access to health care services is already well demonstrated. We also know from previous studies that depressive symptoms can negatively affect long term quality of life and survival rates.
Our major targets are cancer and mental illness. In our centre, two units will be involved in this study: the Neuropsychiatry Unit, a clinical facility for integrated treatment of oncologic and neuropsychiatric disorders and translational research activity; and the Lung Unit, made up of experts in the diagnosis and treatment of lung disease.
Patients will be recruited in the Lung Unit and subsequently screened and monitored by mental health professionals from the Neuropsychiatry Unit.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the concepts and tools used in the FAITH project.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can revolutionise healthcare just like the introduction of steam power, electricity, personal computers and others has had a huge impact in our lives in the past. While AI is poised to revolutionise healthcare, we are still waiting for its long-promised but still under-delivered impact. For the integration of AI to be smooth, it needs to be thoroughly validated, with robust data backing its reliability, with no less stringent testing and scrutiny than any other potential clinical advances. Furthermore, AI implementation in the healthcare sector should happen through user-friendly interfaces, for clinicians and patients alike, to ensure straightforward integration within the remaining clinical infrastructure.
The FAITH concepts could be applicable to any field of medical science where the ambition is to develop assistive diagnostic and patient monitoring tools, and where patient outcomes are a result of the combination of different health-related factors, such as sleep, activity, nutrition and the patient’s own voice and view on their status, treatment and situation, as well as their part in the study. Using AI to explore these factors, which are frequently complex, intertwined and difficult to parse in the eyes of clinicians, might be a helpful solution, not only for its core purpose (that is, to predict mood fluctuations and depression onset), but also to bring insight into unanswered questions of several medical conditions, like those explored in FAITH. Therefore, it’s our belief that the collaboration between healthcare providers and machines, that is, the increased use of devices with machine learning, is one with great potential, where clinical staff are provided with powerful clinical decision support systems, such as those we hope FAITH may bring about.
The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown | Lisbon, Portugal
Hospital G.U. Gregorio Marañón | Madrid, Spain
UPMC Whitfield | Waterford, Ireland
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