Caroline Edijana Omoti1
,
Afekhide Ernest Omoti2
For correspondence:- Caroline Omoti Email: ediomoti@yahoo.com Tel: +2348183502399
Published: 07 December 2021
Citation: Omoti CE, Omoti AE. Palliative care in patients with hematologic malignancies. Trop J Med Dent Pract 2021; 2(4):99-106 doi: 10.47227/tjmdp.v2i4.3
© 2021 The author(s).
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..
Purpose: Patients with haematologic malignancies (HM) present with a significant symptom burden and are more likely to need not only Palliative Care but End-of-Life-care, as these are approaches that improve the quality of life of not only patients but their families facing the burden associated with life threatening illness. This is however not usually incorporated routinely into the management of patients with HM. This literature is to review the role palliative care in the management of patients with HM.
Methods: A search literature was made from Goggle scholar, PubMed Central, Embasse search engines from 1990 to 2022 using the following keywords: palliative care, haematological malignancies, leukaemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndrome, myeloproliferative neoplasm, polycythemia vera, essential thrombocythemia and primary myelofibrosis. Fifty-six relevant studies focusing on palliative care in the various haematological malignancies were selected.
Results: There are trained palliative care (PC) specialists who receive advanced education in providing individualized specific needs for the patient care. They focus on easing pain and discomfort and helping people get the highest quality of life because majority of patients in less developed countries come in late stage. Clinicians who treat patients with cancer often provide a great deal of PC without PC specialists. Therefore, involving a PC specialist in the care of patients with HM is not expected to replace the primary PC if already being provided by the hematologist-oncologists.
Conclusion: As more patients with HM are seen by palliative care specialists, it will be recognized that collaboration can improve the quality of life in the care of patients with high symptom burden via complementary skill sets; but there is a paucity of PC practitioners who are highly needed because HM patients present late in low-and-middle income countries.
