Cuidados Paliativos e Medicina

Abstrato

Systematic Review of Rehabilitation Intervention in Palliative Care for Cancer Patients

Kazunari Abe, Naoki Nakaya, Toshimasa Sone, Toyohiro Hamaguchi, Taichi Sakai, Daisuke Sato1 and Hitoshi Okamura

Aim: Despite the gradually growing recognition of the importance of rehabilitation for cancer patients, the absolute level of awareness about rehabilitation still seems to be low in the field of cancer care, particularly in the field of palliative care for cancer patients.
Methods: We carried out a systematic review of the literature pertaining to rehabilitation intervention in palliative care for cancer patients, using the medical literature database Pub Med. The key words were “cancer,” “palliative care,” and “rehabilitation.” The search was confined to interventional studies, and review papers, case reports and papers whose main text was in a language other than English despite being appended with an English abstract were excluded.
Results: While the literature search yielded 604 published papers based on the keywords, only 8 were eligible for inclusion in this study, demonstrating the scarcity of published studies on this topic. The interventions used in these published studies placed emphasis on mental approaches rather than physical approaches based on the tradition of rehabilitation medicine. Intervention often involved group care rather than separate care for individual patients.
Conclusions: This review demonstrates the scarcity of high-evidence-level studies well founded on oncology, and provides a direction for future studies on this subject.