A Randomized Controlled Trial of Integrated Early Palliative Care for Advanced Gastric Cancer Patients

Cancer patients and their families constantly face physical, psychosocial, economic, and existential problems, but palliative care to solve and prevent them is currently applied only at a late stage in Korean medical practice, which and has many limitations in solving practical difficulties. In order to solve the physical, mental, social, and spiritual health problems experienced by cancer patients in a situation where the cancer incidence rate is increasing every year, the timing and standard of providing palliative care in consideration of the current medical reality and the current status of chemotherapy There is an urgent need for research on a valid medical basis for a new Korean-style early palliative care program. Early palliative care intervention study in patients with advanced cancer (Zimmermann et al, Lancet, 2014) and comparative study of early versus delayed palliative care intervention in patients with advanced cancer \[Project ENABLE III\] (Bakitas et al, JCO, 2015) The study started the intervention immediately after diagnosis of advanced or metastatic cancer. This is done earlier than traditional hospice palliative care, and provides professional services to not only proactively manage symptoms and improve quality of life, but also identify and implement the preferences, values, goals, and needs of patients and families. Although there are studies on the effect of early palliative care in multicenters for patients with locally advanced/metastatic gastric cancer, in the case of studies conducted at multicenters, there is no way to standardize the quality of palliative care at each research institute, so the intervention group is passive treatment. In many cases, it is difficult to obtain homogeneous results when the control group is cross-mixed with the intervention group. Thus, several factors are well-controlled and systematically Through this study, it is necessary to verify the effect of early palliative care in patients with gastric cancer, which occurs the most every year in Koreans. About 170 patients with advanced gastric cancer who were histologically or cytologically diagnosed with gastric cancer at the participating institution are targeted. About 170 recruited patients will be randomly assigned to two groups, the intervention group and the control group.