Study: Palliative care associated with improvements in patient quality of life

Palliative care services are associated with statistically and clinically significant improvements in measures of patient quality of life and symptom burden, according to a study in today’s JAMA. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh identified 43 randomized clinical trials of palliative care interventions in 12,731 adults with life-limiting illness for a systematic review and meta-analyses. Thirty-five trials using traditional care were used as the control. In addition to the associations with improvements in quality of life and disease burden, palliative care was found to  be associated consistently with improvements in advance care planning, patient and caregiver satisfaction, and lower health care utilization. In an accompanying editorial, Preeti N. Malani, M.D., of the University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor, and JAMA associate editor, and Eric Widera, M.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, write that “along with a growing list of studies demonstrating benefit of palliative care, there is an imperative to train both specialists and nonspecialists to deliver interventions proven to be effective.”