Study: Palliative Care Improves Heart Failure Quality-of-Life

According to a Palliative Care Heart Failure (PAL-HF) study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, patients with advanced heart failure who received ongoing, interdisciplinary palliative care showed significant improvements in key measures of well-being. Compared to patients who did not receive the coordinated, ongoing intervention, those who received it consistently showed greater benefits in quality-of-life, anxiety, depression, and spiritual well-being.

“When we do focus on these issues, it is often very late in the course of the illness. It is obvious to those of us who work in this space that palliative care is a reasonable thing to do, but this has not been widely studied. That was the driver for PAL-HF,” said researcher Joseph G. Rogers, MD of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C.

The study included 150 patients with advanced heart failure randomized between mid-August 2012 and late June 2015 to receive either usual care or usual care plus the palliative care intervention at a single treatment center. Click here to read the full story.