Dyspnea--a bad prognosis symptom at the end of life

Abstract

Purposes: Dyspnea as refractory symptom leading to sedation at the end of life and the place of death. Survival study in population with dyspnea.

Methods: Longitudinal study of terminally ill patients in a year (n = 195). We divided populations as (a) population with dyspnea: prevalent and incident dyspnea and (b) population without dyspnea. We used the statistical program Stata9 (Kaplan-Meier and Cox logistic regression models).

Results: The probability of being sedated was 5 times higher in population with dyspnea. Dying in hospital odds ratio was 2.13 in patients with dyspnea. The average survival time was 52 days in patients with dyspnea and 69 in non-dyspnea patients. The average survival was similar between both groups. Patients with incident dyspnea showed a higher average survival than those with prevalent dyspnea.

Conclusions: The connection between dyspnea and sedation was clearly shown. There were significant differences between prevalent dyspnea and incident dyspnea groups.