Challenges in Palliative Care Research: Experience from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Refractory Cancer Cachexia.
There is a paucity of research studies in palliative care with less than 1% of clinical
trials being relevant to the hospice and palliative care setting. Difficulties in conducting studies with this client group such as recruitment, retention, methodological and ethical issues are well documented within the literature.
Nonetheless, conducting research with palliative populations is necessary to
ensure the development of evidence based policies and services which
reflect and respond to the needs of this vulnerable and often underserved population.
Previous research has demonstrated that palliative care patients and their families are willing to be
involved in palliative care research and the onus to conduct high quality rigorous research with
this client group lies with researchers.
It is only through actively engaging in research with the palliative population that we can build an evidence base that will contribute to the development of evidence based policies, protocols and treatments and allow health care professionals to consistently respond to palliative patients and their families in order to maximise their quality of life as they approach the end of their lives.
One of the areas in which this paucity of systematic research has had a detrimental
effect on the care of palliative patients is cachexia. The European Palliative Care Research Collaborative’s guidelines11 on cancer cachexia define it as a multi-factorial syndrome characterised “by an
ongoing loss of skeletal muscle mass that cannot be fully reversed by conventional nutritional support”.
Palliat Med Hosp Care Open J. 2015; 1(2): e1-e3. doi: 10.17140/PMHCOJ-1-e001
