End-of-life chemotherapy and adherence to ASCO’s Top Five List recommendations: A single-center retrospective review.

Abstract

e21509 Background: End-of-life palliative chemotherapy does not improve quality of life nor does it prolong survival of terminal cancer patients. On the contrary, it is related not only to increased health costs, but also to severe therapy related side effects and to patient and caregiver distress. The first point of the ASCO’s Top Five List, released in 2012, tried to address the issue of chemotherapy overuse near the end of life. We tried to determine the aggressiveness of end of life care at our Institute by evaluating the number of patients who received end-of-life chemotherapy. We also aimed to verify whether the recent ASCO recommendations were followed or not. Methods: Electronic medical records were examined to identify patients who received at least one cycle of palliative chemotherapy and who died either in the Oncology or in the Palliative Care unit of the ICS Maugeri hospital between January 2014 and December 2015. Results: 181 patients were included in the study. 22% (40 patients) of these received chemotherapy in the last 4 weeks, and 6% (10 patients) in the last 2 weeks of life. 45% (18) of patients who were actively treated in the last month of life began a new chemotherapeutic regimen within the same period of time. Recently diagnosed patients were more likely to be treated aggressively in their last weeks of life (chi-square test, p value = 0.007). 12% of patients (7 patients) who started a new chemotherapeutic regimen within 90 days of death had already received 3 or more previous regimens. Futhermore, 16% of them (19 patients) had an ECOG PS of 3 or 4 at the beginning of the last regimen. The median survival since the beginning of the last chemotherapeutic regimen was 63 days for patients with a PS of 1 or 2 and 32 days for patients with a PS of 3 or 4 (Logrank test, p = 0.005). Conclusions: Almost 1 patient out of 4 receives end-of-life chemotherapy at our institute. About 30% of our patients began a new chemotherapeutic regimen even though they were in compromised clinical conditions or did not respond to 3 or more previous regimens. Our data highlight a relevant abuse of active anticancer treatments; efforts should be done to reduce these figures and to focus on supportive care near the end of life.