Mastodon Refractory breathlessness: the next #hpmJC Journal Club ~ Pallimed

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Refractory breathlessness: the next #hpmJC Journal Club

By Katherine Sleeman

On Thursday 26th February from 9-10pm UK time (4pm New York, 8am 27th Sydney) we will be holding the monthly Twitter Journal Club for hospice and palliative medicine: #hpmjc. The aim of the journal club is to provide an informal multidisciplinary forum for discussion of latest research findings, and we hope you will join us. You can find some more information about the journal club here.

The paper for discussion this month is 'An integrated palliative and respiratory care service for patients with advanced disease and refractory breathlessness: a randomised controlled trial’. The paper was published in December 2014 in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and is open access.
This month’s journal club will be led by Katherine Sleeman (@kesleeman), Clinical Lecturer at the Cicely Saunders Institute.

Why this paper?

Breathlessness is a common and distressing symptom in advanced diseases such as lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart failure, and is often difficult to manage.

This paper reports the results of a randomised controlled trial of an early integrated breathlessness support service for patients with refractory breathlessness (breathlessness that persists once treatment of the underlying disease is optimised). The breathlessness support service was a multi-professional integrated service combining respiratory, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and palliative care.

What did they find?

105 patients were randomly assigned over 2 years to receive either the breathlessness support service or usual care. The primary outcome was breathlessness mastery at 6 weeks after randomisation. The authors found that breathlessness mastery improved in the intervention group compared with the control group. Intriguingly, they also found that survival at 6 months was better in the breathlessness support service group than the control group.

Questions for discussion:

In your experience, is unrelieved breathlessness is a significant clinical problem?

What are the advantages of a fast track trial in palliative care?

What do you think of the primary endpoint of ‘breathlessness mastery’?

Are you surprised by the improved survival in the intervention arm? What might be the mechanism?

Are randomised controlled trials of palliative care that have patient survival as the primary endpoint needed?

We look forward to discussing this on 26 February, and hope that you can join us. Just follow @hpmjc and use #hpmJC on Twitter.


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