Early integration of palliative care into cancer treatment: impacts in quality of life and survival of patients with advanced cancer

Keywords

Palliative Care - advanced cancer - early integration - quality of life

Palliative Care (PC) is an approach that aims to provide quality of life and prevent the patients and family members suffering in the face of life-threatening conditions, understanding the patient as a biopsychosocial being and integrating physical, social, psychological and spiritual. Despite the movement in favor of implementation of PC, there are still significant challenges to its integration into clinical practice, due to the lack of specialized professionals, resources limitations and the negative stigma that associates PC exclusively with death.

Objective: To demonstrate the positive impact on quality of life and survival of cancer patients when undergoing early PC integration on the treatment.

Methods: It's a literature research in which the following health descriptors were searched at PubMed and SciElo: “palliative care”, “advanced cancer”, “early integration”, “quality of life”. 148 results were found through PubMed and 16 through SciElo. After an individual analysis based on the inclusion criteria: scientific articles related to the theme; studies published from 2017 to 2024; in portuguese (BR), and the exclusion criteria: duplicated articles; unfinished articles; paid articles and the ones that did not breach the selected theme, 112 articles from PubMed and 16 from SciElo were included in the study.

Results: The early approach of PC, done up to 8 weeks after the diagnosis, can decrease the symptomatology in patients (5,6,7,9,12,13); decrease psychosocial suffering and improve quality of life; besides increasing survival rates (9,11). Efficient communication and the educational support are essential to better the involvement of patients and shared decision making (18). However, the failure of health care professionals in knowing the ideal time to implement this treatment and transmitting an end-of-life connotation to the patient, causing them to not adhere to PC, is the main hindrance to carrying out this early care (2,5,7).

Conclusion: According to the analyzed literature, the early implementation of PC in cancer patients is responsible for a reduction in psychosocial suffering, improvement in quality of life and symptom relief, in addition to providing an increase in survival. Thus, the need to introduce this approach early is evident, in addition to a clear and informative conversation with the patient and their family about the credibility and advantages of Palliative Care is important.

Corresponding author: Pamela Tabata Figueiredo Diniz (e-mail: [e-mail]).