Research Article
Systematic Review of Rehabilitation Intervention in Palliative Care for Cancer Patients
Kazunari Abe1, Naoki Nakaya2, Toshimasa Sone3, Toyohiro Hamaguchi4, Taichi Sakai5, Daisuke Sato1 and Hitoshi Okamura6*1Department of Occupational Therapy, Chiba Prefectural University of Health Sciences, 1-1 Ichiba-cho, Chuo-ku, Chiba 260-8667, Japan
2Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology, Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Tohoku University, 2-1 Seiryo-machi, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8573, Japan
3Department of Occupational Therapy, Tohoku Fukushi University, 1-8-1 Kunimi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi 981-8522, Japan
4Department of Occupational Therapy, Saitama Prefectural University, 820 San-Nomiya, Koshigaya, Saitama 343-8540, Japan
5School of Health Sciences and Nursing, Juntendo University, 3-7-33 Ohmiya-cho, Mishima, Shizuoka 411-8787, Japan
6Institute of Biomedical & Health Sciences, Hiroshima University, 1-2-3 Kasumi, Minami-ku, Hiroshima 734-8551, Japan
- *Corresponding Author:
- Hitoshi Okamura, MD
Graduate School of Health Sciences
Hiroshima University, 1-2-3 Kasumi, Minami-ku
Hiroshima 734-8551, Japan
Tel: +81-82-257-5450
Fax: +81-82-257-5454
E-mail: hokamura@hiroshima-u.ac.jp
Received date: August 25, 2012; Accepted date: September 27, 2012; Published date: September 29, 2012
Citation: Abe K, Nakaya N, Sone T, Hamaguchi T, Sakai T, et al. (2012) Systematic Review of Rehabilitation Intervention in Palliative Care for Cancer Patients. J Palliative Care Med 2:131. doi:10.4172/2165-7386.1000131
Copyright: © 2012 Abe K, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Aim: Despite the gradually growing recognition of the importance of rehabilitation for cancer patients, the absolute level of awareness about rehabilitation still seems to be low in the field of cancer care, particularly in the field of palliative care for cancer patients.
Methods: We carried out a systematic review of the literature pertaining to rehabilitation intervention in palliative care for cancer patients, using the medical literature database Pub Med. The key words were “cancer,” “palliative care,” and “rehabilitation.” The search was confined to interventional studies, and review papers, case reports and papers whose main text was in a language other than English despite being appended with an English abstract were excluded.
Results: While the literature search yielded 604 published papers based on the keywords, only 8 were eligible for inclusion in this study, demonstrating the scarcity of published studies on this topic. The interventions used in these published studies placed emphasis on mental approaches rather than physical approaches based on the tradition of rehabilitation medicine. Intervention often involved group care rather than separate care for individual patients.
Conclusions: This review demonstrates the scarcity of high-evidence-level studies well founded on oncology, and provides a direction for future studies on this subject.
