Palliative Care Extends Life of Lung Cancer Patients, Study Finds
One more thing that shows you how stupid Palin’s “Death Panels!” campaign was.
This is something we have studied in depth for our mother, who has stage IV lung cancer — our goal is to keep her in the best shape for the longest time with the best quality of life.
The findings, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, confirmed what palliative care specialists had long suspected. It also, experts said, cast doubt on the decision to strike end-of-life provisions from the health care overhaul passed last year.
“It shows that palliative care is the opposite of all that rhetoric about ‘death panels,’ ” said Dr. Diane E. Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-author of an editorial in the journal accompanying the study. “It’s not about killing Granny, it’s about keeping Granny alive as long as possible — with the best quality of life.”
In the three-year study, 151 patients with fast-growing lung cancer at Massachusetts General, one of the nation’s top hospitals, were randomly assigned to get either oncology treatment alone or oncology treatment with palliative care — pain relief and other measures intended to improve a patient’s quality of life. They were followed until the end of 2009, by which time about 70 percent were dead.
Those getting palliative care from the start, the authors said, reported less depression and happier lives as measured on scales for pain, nausea, mobility, worry and other problems. Moreover, even though substantially fewer of them opted for aggressive chemotherapy as their illnesses worsened and many more left orders that they not be resuscitated in a crisis, they typically lived almost three months longer than the group getting standard care, who lived a median of nine months.