Highlights ■ Outpatient palliative care follow-up increased median survival by 4.7 months in patients with advanced head and neck cancer. ■ Patients receiving palliative care had fewer intensive care unit deaths, less chemotherapy in the final month of life, and a reduced need for palliative sedation. ■ Integrated palliative care resulted in fewer emergency visits per month of follow-up, suggesting more efficient symptom management. ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate whether integrated palliative care is associated with improved overall survival and better […]

Highlights ■ No baseline differences between the groups icodextrin versus glucose. ■ Icodextrin significantly improved ultrafiltration, extracellular water, and phase angle. ■ Mortality and technique survival did not differ between the groups during follow-up. ABSTRACT Objective: The efficacy of icodextrin versus glucose patients undergoing peritoneal dialysis remains unclear. The study was designed to compare the effects of once-daily long-dwell icodextrin versus glucose on markers of hypervolemia and survival among patients with kidney failure undergoing an unplanned initiation of automated peritoneal […]

Highlights Fatality due to COVID-19 does not alter the time under oncological palliative care. The retrospective design of this pioneering study allows causal inference. Access to oncological palliative care frequently approaches terminality of life. ABSTRACT Objective: This study aimed at investigating the extent to which COVID-19-induced fatalities affect the duration of palliative care among patients with advanced cancer. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted at the Palliative Care Unit of the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Câncer in Rio de […]

Highlights Intrathecal chemotherapy did not increase overall survival or time to neurologic deterioration. Compared with no treatment, systemic therapy with no intrathecal chemotherapy afforded better overall survival. Intrathecal chemotherapy should not postpone or preclude systemic treatment. ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate whether intrathecal chemotherapy improves clinical outcomes in patients with meningeal carcinomatosis. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included consecutive patients with breast cancer diagnosed with meningeal carcinomatosis. Clinical and treatment data were collected from the patients’ medical charts. The primary outcome […]

Highlights Two artificial neural networks, type of multilayer perceptron, and a random forest model were developed. Multilayer perceptron and random forest were compared to the OASIS, SAPS, SAPS II, SAPS III, LODS, SOFA, and EVCI Scores. Discrimination was assessed with the receiver operator characteristic and precision-recall curves. Calibration of the predictive models was evaluated with the Brier Score. ABSTRACT Objective The variation in mortality rates of intensive care unit oncological patients may imply that clinical characteristics and prognoses are very […]

ABSTRACT The objective of the present study was to assess the efficacy of different doses, times for infusion of the first dose, intervals of administration of subsequent doses, and number of epinephrine doses in the survival of children and adolescents who went into cardiorespiratory arrest. It is a review study with data from the PubMedⓇ/MEDLINEⓇdatabase. The search was for articles published from January 1st, 2000 to February 10, 2019, with a sample of patients aged under 18 years, published in […]

ABSTRACT Objective: To present a descriptive analysis of patients diagnosed with multiple myeloma, correlating it with mortality. Methods: A retrospective study that analyzed consecutive patients diagnosed with multiple myeloma under follow-up at the Faculdade de Medicina do ABC from 2006 to 2010. Results: The median age was 58.5 years. Anemia was observed upon diagnosis in 87% of patients, hypercalcemia in 38%, and creatinine levels higher than 2 mg/dL in 19%. M protein was detected in 85.7%. The five-year survival rate […]

ABSTRACT Objective: To compare three different regimens of thymoglobulin induction. Methods: One hundred seventy two patients submitted to renal transplantation from a dead donor were divided into three groups according to the total number of thymoglobulin doses used in the post-transplantation surgery: Group 1, until 14 doses – May 2002 to June 2004 (n = 48); Group 2, until 7 doses – July 2004 to December 2006 (n = 57); Group 3, until 4 doses – January 2007 to July […]