Palliative sedation for terminally ill cancer patients in a tertiary cancer center in Shanghai, China

BMC Palliative Care

Research Article

Menglei Chen¹  Minghui Liu¹  Wenwu Cheng¹  Zhe Zhang¹  Xiaoli Gu¹ 

[1] Department of Integrated Therapy, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, #270, Dong’An Road, 200032, Shanghai, People's Republic of China;Department of Oncology, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, #270, Dong’An Road, 200032, Shanghai, China;

关键词: Palliative sedation;    Terminally ill cancer patients;    Survival;    End of life;    Symptom management;    Agitated delirium;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12904-015-0002-6

 received in 2014-08-19, accepted in 2015-02-20,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThere are a number of studies dedicated to characteristics of sedation, but these studies are mostly bound to western country practices. The aim of this study is to describe the characteristics of patients who suffered from cancer and who had been sedated until their death in Shanghai, China.MethodsRetrospective medical data of 244 terminally ill cancer patients including 82 sedated patients were collected. Data collected included demographic characteristics, disease-related characteristics and details of the sedation.ResultsIn sedated cases, patients and/or caregivers gave the consent to start palliative sedation due to unmanageable symptoms. On average, sedation was performed 24.65(±1.78)hours before death. Agitated delirium and dyspnea were the most frequent indications for palliative sedation. There was no significant difference in survival time from admission till death between sedated and non-sedated patients (p > 0.05).ConclusionsPalliative sedation is effective for reducing terminally ill cancer patients’ suffering without hastening death. Prospective research is needed to determine the optimal conditions for Chinese patients including indications, decision making process, informed consent, cultural and ethical issues, type of sedation and drugs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Gu et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.