New prognostic tools for patients with advanced cancer in palliative care can reliably predict survival times, researchers find.
Four prognostic models based on several clinical variables were at least as good as a clinician’s estimate of survival, and sometimes better, the study published in the BMJ found.
Using clinical variables without a blood test, the models’ predictions of whether a patient was going to survive days, weeks or months/years were correct on 59.6% of occasions, and the predictions of a nurses and doctor were correct in 57.5% of occasions.
When a blood test was added, the models performed significantly better than either the doctor or the nurse, but were not significantly better than their estimates combined.
The prognostic tools could be easily applied in...
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