Doctors have been urged to be more cautious in offering cancer treatment to terminally-ill patients as chemotherapy can often do more harm than good, a study suggests.
Patients with incurable cancers were promised much greater access to the latest drugs which could offer them extra months or years of life by a Department of Health review last week.
Such medicines are often taken or injected as part of a “cocktail” of chemotherapy drugs.
But the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) found that more than four in ten patients who received chemotherapy towards the end of life suffered potentially fatal effects from the drugs, and treatment was “inappropriate” in nearly a fifth of cases.
About 300,000 patients now receive chemotherapy in the UK each year, a 60 per cent increase compared to 2004.
But in a study of more than 600 cancer patients who died within 30 days of receiving treatment, chemotherapy probably caused or hastened death in 27 per cent of cases, the inquiry found.
In only 35 per cent of these cases was care judged to have been good by the inquiry’s advisors, with 49 per cent having room for improvement and 8 per cent receiving less than satisfactory care.
More than one fifth of patients were already severely debilitated at the time the decision to treat with chemotherapy was taken, while that many could not make an informed consent to treatment, the report said.
More
No comments:
Post a Comment