Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2014
Randomized Controlled TrialCan senior volunteers deliver reminiscence and creative activity interventions? Results of the legacy intervention family enactment randomized controlled trial.
Palliative care patients and their family caregivers may have a foreshortened perspective of the time left to live, or the expectation of the patient's death in the near future. Patients and caregivers may report distress in physical, psychological, or existential/spiritual realms. ⋯ Delivery of the intervention by RSVs had a positive impact on palliative care patients' emotional symptoms and burden and caregivers' meaning in life. Meaningful prolonged engagement with palliative care patients and caregivers, possibly through alternative modes of treatment delivery such as continued RSV contact, may be necessary for maintenance of therapeutic effects.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2014
Observational StudyVariations in vital signs in the last days of life in patients with advanced cancer.
Few studies have examined variation in vital signs in the last days of life. ⋯ Blood pressure and oxygen saturation decreased in the last days of life. Clinicians and families cannot rely on vital sign changes alone to rule in or rule out impending death. Our findings do not support routine vital signs monitoring of patients who are imminently dying.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2014
Psychometric properties of the Polish version of the Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory-20 in cancer patients.
Multidimensional questionnaires estimating cancer-related fatigue (CRF) as a symptom cluster or a clinical syndrome primarily have been used and validated in English-speaking populations. However, cultural issues and language peculiarities can affect CRF assessment ⋯ The Polish version of the MFI-20 is well accepted by patients, reliable, and a valid instrument to assess CRF in Polish cancer patients.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2014
Perceptions of health status and survival in patients with metastatic lung cancer.
Cognitive awareness of having a terminal illness is associated with critical treatment decisions and outcomes. However, little is known about the course and correlates of such perceptions in patients with metastatic lung cancer. ⋯ A minority of patients with metastatic NSCLC acknowledged being terminally ill. Those reporting that they were seriously and terminally ill had shorter survival compared with those who did not consider themselves terminally ill, even after adjusting for decline in physical and functional well-being.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2014
Propensity scores: a practical method for assessing treatment effects in pain and symptom management research.
When conducting research on pain and symptom management interventions for seriously ill individuals, randomized controlled trials are not always feasible or ethical to conduct. Secondary analyses of observational data sets that include information on treatments experienced and outcomes for individuals who did and did not receive a given treatment can be conducted, but confounding because of selection bias can obscure the treatment effect in which one is interested. Propensity scores provide a way to adjust for observable characteristics that differ between treatment and comparison groups. This article provides conceptual guidance in addition to an empirical example to illustrate two areas of propensity score analysis that often lead to confusion in practice: covariate selection and interpretation of resultant treatment effects.