| Title |
Symptomatic treatment of dyspnea in advanced cancer patients
|
|---|---|
| Published in |
Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, September 2017
|
| DOI | 10.1007/s10354-017-0600-4 |
| Pubmed ID | |
| Authors |
Matthäus Strieder, Martin Pecherstorfer, Gudrun Kreye |
| Abstract |
Dyspnea is a common, very distressing symptom in advanced cancer patients that challenges them, their relatives, and healthcare professionals. This narrative review summarizes important literature dealing with the evidence for opioids, benzodiazepines, oxygen, and steroids for treating dyspnea in advanced cancer patients. A selective literature search was undertaken in PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library and extended with literature from the reference lists of included studies up to April 2016. Inclusion criteria were that patients were suffering from advanced cancer and were receiving either opioids, benzodiazepines, corticosteroids, or oxygen. The outcome of interest was the reduction of dyspnea measured via a visual analogue scale (VAS), a numerical rating scale (NRS), or a Borg scale. This narrative review describes in detail the findings of 13 studies. Nine studies deal with the effectiveness of opioids for reducing dyspnea in advanced cancer patients. Five of these found a significant benefit to the use of opioids compared to a placebo. Three found no significant improvements, and two favored combinations of opioids and benzodiazepines. Few high-quality studies were available that used benzodiazepines (n = 3, no difference, significant improvement with midazolam + morphine, significant difference for midazolam) or oxygen (n = 2, both without significant difference). Only one study examined treating dyspnea with steroids in patients with advanced cancer, and that study indicated a benefit of steroids compared to a placebo. Opioids are the drug of choice for treating refractory dyspnea in advanced cancer patients. Neither benzodiazepines nor oxygen showed significant benefit. In addition, there is insufficient literature available to draw a conclusion about the effectiveness of steroids for treating persistent dyspnea in advanced cancer patients. |
X Demographics
The data shown below were collected from the profile of 1 X user who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown | 1 | 100% |
Demographic breakdown
| Type | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Members of the public | 1 | 100% |
Mendeley readers
The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 46 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown | 46 | 100% |
Demographic breakdown
| Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Student > Master | 10 | 22% |
| Other | 5 | 11% |
| Student > Ph. D. Student | 5 | 11% |
| Student > Doctoral Student | 3 | 7% |
| Student > Bachelor | 3 | 7% |
| Other | 6 | 13% |
| Unknown | 14 | 30% |
| Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Medicine and Dentistry | 18 | 39% |
| Nursing and Health Professions | 7 | 15% |
| Veterinary Science and Veterinary Medicine | 2 | 4% |
| Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science | 2 | 4% |
| Psychology | 1 | 2% |
| Other | 1 | 2% |
| Unknown | 15 | 33% |
Attention Score in Context
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 14 May 2021.
All research outputs
#6,632,549
of 23,849,058 outputs
Outputs from Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift
#102
of 436 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#102,716
of 320,109 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift
#3
of 8 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,849,058 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 71st percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 436 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.9. This one has done well, scoring higher than 76% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 8 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than 5 of them.