Patients with advanced cancer are better off dying at home as it improves quality-of-life during the end of life.

The striking finding of the study states that bereaved caregivers of patients who died in an intensive care unit (ICU) were five times more likely to be diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), compared with caregivers of patients who died at home with hospice services.
"This is the first study to show that caregivers of patients who die in ICUs are at a heightened risk for developing PTSD," said the authors, led by Alexi Wright, a medical oncologist and outcomes researcher at Dana-Farber.
Patients and caregivers were interviewed at the beginning of the study and post death caregivers were interviewed on regular intervals.
After analyzing the data on 342 patient-caregiver pairs, the investigators found that patients who had died in the hospital or an ICU experienced more physical and emotional distress and worse quality of life than those dying at home.
Among the caregivers, they determined that 4 of 19 caregivers (21 percent) of patients dying in an ICU developed PTSD, compared with 6 of 137 (4.4 percent) when death occurred in the home/hospice setting.
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The research has been published in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
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