Quality of Life Better with Less Care at the End

Patients dying of cancer have a better quality of life towards the end if aggressive, life-prolonging measures are avoided and if they are able to die at home, a multicenter study suggested.

Being admitted to the intensive care unit during the last week of life was the strongest negative factor, accounting for −4.4% of variance in patients' quality of life, according to Holly G. Prigerson, PhD, and colleagues from Harvard University in Boston.

Also strongly influential was in-hospital death, which explained an additional −2.7% of the variance, the researchers reported online in Archives of Internal Medicine.

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Source: MedPage Today