• BMC palliative care · Nov 2016

    The association between different opioid doses and the survival of advanced cancer patients receiving palliative care.

    • Anon Sathornviriyapong, Kittiphon Nagaviroj, and Thunyarat Anothaisintawee.
    • Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, 270 Rama VI Street, Rajthevi, Bangkok, 10400, Thailand.
    • BMC Palliat Care. 2016 Nov 21; 15 (1): 95.

    BackgroundConcerns that opioids may hasten death can be a cause of the physicians' reluctance to prescribe opioids, leading to inadequate symptom palliation. Our aim was to find if there was an association between different opioid doses and the survival of the cancer patients that participated in our palliative care program.MethodsA retrospective study was conducted at Ramathibodi Hospital, Bangkok between January 2013 and December 2015. All of the cancer patients that were referred to palliative care teams by their primary physicians were included in the study. The study data included the patients' demographics, disease status, comorbidities, functional status, type of services, cancer treatments, date of consultation, and the date of the patient's death or last follow-up. The information concerning opioid use was collected by reviewing the medical records and this was converted to an oral morphine equivalent (OME), following a standard ratio. The time-varying covariate in the Cox regression analysis was applied in order to determine the association between different doses of opioids and patient survival.ResultsA total of 317 cancer patients were included in the study. The median (IQR) of the OME among our patients was 6.43 mg/day (0.53, 27.36). The univariate Cox regression analysis did not show any association between different opioid doses (OME ≤ 30 mg/day and > 30 mg/day) and the patients' survival (p = 0.52). The PPS levels (p < 0.01), palliative care clinic visits (HR 0.32, 95%CI 0.24-0.43), home visits (HR 0.75, 95%CI 0.57-0.99), chemotherapy (HR 0.32, 95%CI 0.22-0.46), and radiotherapy (HR 0.53, 95%CI 0.36-0.78) were identified as factors that increased the probability of survival.ConclusionsOur study has demonstrated that different opioid doses in advanced cancer patients are not associated with shortened survival period.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…