Transitions in palliative care: conceptual diversification and the integration of palliative care into standard oncology care.

Palliative care acknowledges the historical origin of the hospice developed in the UK during the 20th century. Palliative care initially focused primarily on end-of-life care provided at hospices, but then changed to at-home care, leading to the formation of a support system provided by the palliative care team. The palliative care team further coordinated with acute care hospitals and became involved in earlier stages of care as well, such as providing symptomatic relief in conjunction with cancer treatment. On this backdrop, the concept of palliative care itself also evolved over time. In recent years, attempts at early-stage palliative care from the initial stages of treatment are being studied with respect to cases with complications such as advanced cancer. Early-stage palliative care has been reported to improve patient quality of life (QOL), improve depression, reduce the burden on the family, and possibly improve survival prognosis for some advanced cancers. Currently, efforts to integrate palliative care into standard oncology care regimens by providing specialist palliative care and cancer treatment as a single unit are anticipated to enter more widespread practice. Such a care approach differs from conventional palliative care, which is started around the time when the end of conventional cancer treatment, and consists of applying specialist palliative care from the stage where cancer treatments are administered to address with multiple problems. Many breast cancer patients have severe problems such as esthetic outcome, sexuality and psycho-social effects associated with breast cancer itself and treatment. And it effects their QOL for a long time not only during therapy but also having done therapy or recurrence. Therefore, it may be effectiveness for patients to integrate of palliative care into standard oncology care in breast cancer, but the effect of it for only breast cancer patients has not been reported on yet. In this paper, after reviewing the concepts and historical evolution of palliative care, we describe the integration of palliative care into standard oncology care that has been making progress recently.

Characteristics of suicide attempts in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in comparison with depression: a study of emergency room visit cases in Japan.

We worked on characterizing suicide attempts in patients with schizophrenia in comparison with mood disorders. This study population comprised 260 patients with F2 disorders (ICD-10), i.e., "schizophrenic group" and 705 patients with F3 disorders, i.e., "depressive group" who presented at the psychiatric emergency department of our hospital for 8 years. They were compared in three age groups: young (≤24 years), middle-aged (25-44 years), and elderly (≥45 years). Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified factors associated with the seriousness of the suicide attempt method. The schizophrenic group (≥25 years) had a younger mean age and higher prevalences of "within-1-year suicide attempts" and "past suicide attempts" than the depressive group. The Schizophrenic group tended to use serious methods, such as "jumping from high places," "throwing oneself in front of an oncoming train," and "burning oneself," in their suicide attempts, with "hallucination-delusion" accounting for an overwhelmingly large percentage of suicide attempt motives, irrespective of the age group. In the elderly group, the ratio of "no-housemate" patients was high. In all age groups, jobless individuals were prevalent, and the schizophrenic group had lower LCU (Life Change Unit) scores than did the depressive group. The middle-aged cases of schizophrenic group had higher BPRS (Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale) scores and lower GAS (Global Assessment Scale) scores. Regarding factors influencing the seriousness of the methods, a history of within-1-year suicide attempts increased the method seriousness in the schizophrenic group. Years of education correlated with the method seriousness in the schizophrenic group. Low scores of overall health on the GAS increased the method seriousness in both groups.