Palliative Care & CHF: PAL-HF trial
The main results of PAL-HF - a randomized, controlled trial of specialty palliative care team involvement in advanced heart failure patients - have just been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (DOI: 10.1016/j.jacc.2017.05.030. Clinicaltrials.gov registration here). This is an important, well-done study, with encouraging results - specialty PC improved the quality of life of patients with HF. I ' ll discuss the results in more details in this post.The study was done by a multi-disciplinary team of palliative& cardiology investigators at Duke. This week ' s publication looks at QOL results which were the main, pre-specified outcomes. Of note, in the clinicaltrials.gov registration for the study, they do pre-specify healthcare resource utilization outcomes as one of their secondary outcomes, but this paper doesn ' t present those data - presumably those will take them longer to collect and will be forthcoming. PAL-HF enrolled 150 hospitalized patients with HF at high risk of mortality or rehospitalization, and randomized the patients to receiving specialty palliative care vs usual care. They identified patients using the ESCAPE risk model, which I hadn ' t heard of - key reference is here. The inclusion criteria involved the patients having an ESCAPE model predicted 6 month of mortality - notably in this study the actual 6 month mortality was 30%.Intervention-arm patients received a pall...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: chf heart failure research research issues rosielle Source Type: blogs
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