Treatment decisions and discontinuation of palliative chemotherapy near the end-of-life, in relation to socioeconomic variables

Figures & data

Table I. Patients included in the study. Initially, 424 patients who had at least one entry in the computerized medical record system at the Oncology Department were screened. Patients who were not eligible for different reasons were excluded, resulting in 346 study patients.

Total number of patients who had died	424
Excluded patients	78
Reasons for exclusion
Curative cancer patients, died from other reasons	17
Malignant diagnosis not verified, died from other reasons	10
Only one visit, for a second opinion (not treated at the department)	5
Only a conference note, no other details in the records	5
Under-aged (<18 years), treated at the children's hospital	4
Never showed up	4
Incomplete data/missing data, not proper for the study	33
Total number of patients who were included	346

Table II. Cancer diagnoses relation to given chemotherapy. In the cohort of 346 patients (Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden 2009), a total of 187 received treatment.

Diagnosis (number of patients)	Chemotherapy given (%)
Cerebral tumors (n = 5)	100
Hematological malignancies (n = 9)	78
Sarcomas (n = 8)	75
Gynecological cancer (n = 26)	69
Head and neck cancer (n = 25)	60
Lower gastro-intestinal cancer (n = 38)	58
Breast cancer (n = 37)	57
Lung cancer (n = 65)	55
Upper gastro-intestinal cancer (n = 46)	50
Skin cancer, including melanoma (n = 16)	44
Cancer of an unknown primary site – CUP (n = 13)	38
Urothelial cancer (n = 23)	35
Prostate cancer (n = 35)	26

Figure 1. The number of specified chemotherapy regimens. Most of the patients received only first-line and second-line palliative chemotherapy.

Table III. Odds ratio for different variables. Age and education remained significant variables in the multiple logistic regression analysis.

Variable	Exp(B)	Lower 95% CI	Upper 95% CI
Age per each 10 years	1.65	1.06	2.54
Education ‘Medium’ vs. ‘Low’	1.19	0.52	2.70
Education ‘High’ vs. ‘Low’	3.17	1.17	8.58
Presence of under-aged children	2.40	0.52	11.12
Men vs. women	0.62	0.29	1.34
Non-European ethnicity	2.06	0.74	5.73
Living in a single household	0.85	0.39	1.84