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Little attention has been paid to the symptom management needs of patients
with life-threatening diseases other than cancer. In this study, researchers
aimed to determine to what extent patients with progressive chronic diseases
have similar symptom profiles. A systematic search of medical databases and
textbooks identified 64 original studies reporting the prevalence of 11 common
symptoms among end-stage patients with cancer, AIDS, heart disease, chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, or renal disease. Analyzing the data, investigators
found that the prevalence of the 11 symptoms was often widely but consistently
spread across the five diseases. Three symptoms--pain, breathlessness, and fatigue--were
found among more than 50% of patients, for all five diseases. There appears
to be a common pathway toward death for malignant and nonmalignant diseases.
The designs of symptom prevalence studies need to be improved because of method
disparities in assessing symptoms and in study design. Solano JP, Gomes B, Higginson
IJ. Adapted from J
Pain Symptom Manage. 2006 Jan;31(1):58-69.
PMID 16442483
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16442483&query_hl=35
Credit: PubMed, developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information
(NCBI) at the
National Library of Medicine (NLM).
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