Patients with cancer who died at home had similar or longer survival compared with patients who died at a hospital, according to a recent study.
The location in which patients with cancer die has a significant influence on the quality of death, but there have remained questions regarding whether survival time is affected by the place of death.
Therefore, researchers led by Jun Hamano, MD, University of Tsukuba (Ibaraki, Japan), conducted a study with the aim of exploring how survival times differed between patients who died at a hospital and patients who died at their homes. Their results were published in Cancer.
The study recruited 2069 patients for analysis (1582 receiving hospital-based palliative care and 487 receiving home-based palliative care) and was conducted in Japan from September 2012 through April 2014. At the time of analysis, a total of 1607 patients actually died at the hospital while 462 patients died at home.
Patients recruited for the study were broken into three segments based on prognosis: those expected to live days, those expected to live weeks, and those expected to live months. Survival times at both hospitals and homes were analyzed for each group.
Results showed that in patients with a prognosis of only days to live, those who died at home survived significantly longer (13 days) than those who died at a hospital (9 days). In patients with weeks to live, survival time was again higher for patients who died at home, outlasting those who died at the hospital by about 17 days (36 days vs 29 days). However, in the group expected to live for months, the difference in survival time was found to not be statistically significant.
Overall, further statistical analysis confirmed that the place of death had a significant influence on the survival time of patients dying at home and in the hospital.
