Limbaugh/Palin "death panels" extend the lives of terminally ill patients

What is palliative care? Until quite recently, it's something I haven't given much thought. Although there was a highly regarded article on hospice and palliative care by Atul Gawande in last month's New Yorker, I didn't read it or think it applied to my life. All that changed less than two weeks ago, when my father was hospitalized in critical condition after collapsing. First he went to the ER, then the transitional ICU, and finally he was placed in the palliative care unit by the time I arrived. You see, my father has metastatic lung cancer, for which he had refused treatment for more than a year. Instead, he decided to stay home with my mother, watch DVDs, go out to eat, and do yard work.¹

A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated that the introduction of palliative care shortly after the diagnosis of metastatic lung cancer not only improved the patients' quality of life, but also extended median survival from 8.9 months to 11.6 months (Temel et al., 2010). According to the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine:

The goal of palliative care is to prevent and relieve suffering and to support the best possible quality of life for patients and their families, regardless of the stage of the disease or the need for other therapies. Palliative care is both a philosophy of care and an organized, highly structured system for delivering care. Palliative care expands traditional disease-model medical treatments to include the goals of enhancing quality of life for patient and family, optimizing function, helping with decision-making and providing opportunities for personal growth. As such, it can be delivered concurrently with life-prolonging care or as the main focus of care.

This finding is critically important for providers of medical care for terminally ill cancer patients as well as for health policy, because it provides categorical, scientific proof that the notion of "death panels" is false. As stated in the New York Times:

“It shows that palliative care is the opposite of all that rhetoric about ‘death panels,’ ” said Dr. Diane E. Meier [@DianeEMeier], director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-author of an editorial in the journal accompanying the study. “It’s not about killing Granny; it’s about keeping Granny alive as long as possible — with the best quality of life.”

A straw man in the 2009 health care debate, "death panels" invoked the specter of rationing medical procedures provided for the sick and the elderly. In the name of cost cutting, blared the phony rhetoric on talk radio and Sarah Palin's Facebook page, the Obama administration would sanction euthanasia for elders and the terminally ill under provisions of the health care bill. This would save on expensive treatments that prolong patients' lives but increase the deficit, claimed the conservative crew. However, these scare tactics were an outright lie, as we learn from the Wall Street Journal:

Palin’s “Death Panels” Charge Named “Lie of the Year”

...

“Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest,” writes Politifact.com, the non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning site run by the St. Petersburg Times. Palin’s “assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings.”

“Opponents of health-care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink,” Polifact.com says.

The NEJM study enrolled 151 patients with newly diagnosed metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer. Seventy-four received standard care and 77 patients received palliative care, which included meetings with a member of the palliative care team (board-certified palliative care physicians and advanced-practice nurses). The first meeting was within 3 weeks of enrollment, and subsequent meetings were held on a monthly basis, with additional sessions at the discretion of the patient and the clinical treatment team. Patients assigned to standard care did not meet with the palliative care team (unless requested). All patients continued to receive standard oncology care for the duration of the study.

These meetings are the so-called "death panels" that would have been covered by Medicare, as mentioned by the NYT in Palliative Care Extends Life, Study Finds:

During the debate over President Obama’s 2009 health care bill, provisions to have Medicare and insurers pay for optional consultations with doctors on palliative and hospice care led to rumors, spread by talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, that the bill empowered “death panels” that would “euthanize” elderly Americans. [emphasis mine]

The primary outcome measure of the study was quality of life at 12 weeks (compared to baseline), as assessed by the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy–Lung (FACT-L) scale. Mood was assessed using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9).

Results indicated that patients in the palliative care group had a significantly higher quality of life at 12 weeks (see Table 2) and a lower incidence of depression (but similar levels of anxiety).

[click on Table for larger image]

Table 2 (Temel et al., 2010). Plus–minus values are means ±SD. Quality of life was assessed with the use of three scales: the FACT-L scale, on which scores range from 0 to 136, with higher scores indicating better quality of life; the lung-cancer subscale (LCS) of the FACT-L scale, on which scores range from 0 to 28, with higher scores indicating fewer symptoms; and the Trial Outcome Index (TOI), which is the sum of the scores on the LCS and the physical well-being and functional well-being subscales of the FACT-L scale (scores range from 0 to 84, with higher scores indicating better quality of life).

In addition, patients in the palliative care group lived longer:

Despite receiving less aggressive end-of-life care,² patients in the palliative care group had significantly longer survival than those in the standard care group (median survival, 11.6 vs. 8.9 months; P=0.02).

The study has its limitations, however, as noted by Dr. Meier in Palliative Care: We Still Have a Lot to Learn:

...The patients (and doctors) were not blinded to their treatment group, that is, they knew which group they were in, which could have affected their outcomes. Also, there was no “attention-control” group—a group that got the same amount of human time and attention that the palliative care group got but without the palliative care skill and expertise.

Nonetheless, the purpose and goals of palliative care cannot be understated. As I mentioned in my previous post (Ketamine for Depression: Yay or Neigh?), reducing the pain and suffering of terminally ill patients is of utmost importance. Watching a terminally ill loved one suffer from unbearably excruciating pain is one of the most emotionally wrenching experiences you'll ever have. Anything, and I mean anything, that will relieve this sort of suffering (including heroin) should be administered without reservation or stigma. The options offered by hospice and palliative care should be made freely available to patients as part of a comprehensive health care plan. But Sarah Palin is still spewing her falsehoods a year after she started, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

UPDATE Sept 6, 2010: My father died at 12:30PM today. I'll miss him terribly.

Footnotes

¹ In other words, he chose to live as normally as possible.

² Aggressive care was defined as chemotherapy within 14 days before death; no hospice care; or admission to hospice 3 days or less before death.

Reference

J.S. Temel et al. (2010). Early Palliative Care for Patients with Metastatic Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer. N Engl J Med, 363, 733-742. 10.1056/NEJMoa1000678

Additional Reading from Pallimed blog:

Game Changer: Early Palliative Care for Lung Cancer Patients Improves QOL AND Median Survival

You had me at 'improves HRQOL'...